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AS CARLYLE 



E^.>r!\r- .. TKS BY 

CORNELIUS BEACPI READLEY, A.M. 

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ESSAY ON BURNS 



BY 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY 

COENELIUS BEACH BEADLEY, A.M. 

PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC, UNIVERSITY OF 
CALIFORNIA 



ov nhXt atlct,' TioXi)" 






BENJ. H. SANBOEN & CO, 
BOSTON, U.S.A. 



THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Cop«Ed Received 

NOV. 5 1901 

COPVRIOHT ENTRY 

C|CLASS (XKXa No 

I ^ oo 6 

COPY a 



Copyright, 1901, 
By CORNELIUS B. BRADLEY, 



Stanbopc press 

F. H. GItSON COMPANY 
BOSTON, U. S. A. 



3 C< 

* 5^ 






PEEFAOE, 



In the previous publications of this series, it has 
been thought best to avoid any possible schism in the 
instruction of young students, by conforming all mat- 
ters of capitalization, punctuation, and spelling to 
the best current practice in our own country. In 
the present instance, however, capitalization and 
punctuation were found to be so inextricably involved 
with the peculiar features of Carlyle's thought and 
expression — were in fact such inseparable parts of 
the composition — that it was decided to retain them 
unchanged. This, it was thought, might be the more 
safely done, since in this essay Carlyle's departures 
from the norm are by no means so extreme as in his 
later work. The text of the Centenary edition has 
been followed throughout, save in the matter of 
spelling. 

The important task of the preparation of the text 
was very kindly undertaken and carried out by Mr. 
Thomas Hall, Jr., the editor-in-chief, to whom I am 

iii 



IV PREFACE. 

also under obligation for valuable assistance in other 
parts of the work. For many useful clews — which 
yet I have used only as clews — I am indebted to my 
predecessors in this field, especially to Mr. Henry 
W. Boynton. And, in conclusion, my acknowledg- 
ments are due to the officers of the Boston Public 
Library for facilities offered me in my work of re- 
search and verification. 

Cornelius Beach Bradley. 
Boston, June 22, 1901. 



00]^TETirTS, 



Introduction ^ page 

I. Thomas Carlyle vii-xxi 

Boyhood and Youth vii 

Choice of a Profession ...... x 

Marriage xiv 

Craigenputtock xvii 

Career in London xix 

II. The Essay on Burns xxi-xxx 

Its History xxi 

Its Structure xxiv 

Summary of its Thought ..... xxiv 

Its Poetical Features ...... xxvii 

Dates in the Life of Burns .... xxviii 

III. Suggestions to Teachers xxx 

IV. Bibliography xxxiii 

Carlyle 's Essay on Egbert Burns 1 

Notes 113 



lE'TEODUOTIOK 



I. THOMAS CAELYLE. 

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 

His Early Home, 

Two strangely contrasted scenes claim the honor 
of being the homes of Thomas Carlyle^ and divide 
between them in nearly equal proportions the years 
of his active life. One was Dumfriesshire, Scotland, 
— arida nutrix leonum, — the stern, meagre, lonely 
region of his birth, scene of the hard discipline that 
gave temper and edge to his spirit, and of his long 
and painful apprenticeship ; yet it was to the end the 
home of his heart, and there his dust now mingles 
with kindred dust. The other was London, centre 
and heart of the world, throbbing with fierce and 
tumultuous life, the only place where a great literary 
genius of our race can find real scope and the ma- 
terials and inspiration for his work; scene of our 
author's hard-earned but magnificent triumph, shelter 

vii 



Viii THOMAS CARLYLE. 

of his lonely and declining years ; and in London he 
died. It is, however, with Carlyle's earlier home, and 
with his life in it, that we now have chiefly to do. 
Here it was, with an insight and a sympathy born of 
experiences in many ways paralleling those of the 
struggling poet-lad, that Carlyle wrote his Essay on 
Burns. Here too, not long before, had lived Burns 
himself during his later years. Yonder, just over 
the western hills, were the Ayr and the " Bonnie 
Doon,'^ streams that he had loved and sung, — were 
Mossgiel and Tarbolton, his earlier homes, and the 
fields where in spite of toil and penury the poet had 

" walked in glory and in joy 
Following his plough, along the mountain-side." 

Dumfriesshire lies on the western coast, directly 
adjoining the English border. It is an irregular 
oblong of some thirty miles by forty, fronting on 
Solway Firth, rising gently to the north, and drained 
by three parallel streams — the Esk, the Annan, and 
the Nith — whose open, arable bottom-lands are the 
three " dales '' named from these streams. 

His Birth and Education. 

In Annandale the Carlyles had been settled for 
many generations ; perhaps at first of noble rank, but 
if so, on that grudging soil reduced at length to 



INTRODUCTION. ix 

peasant-status; yet ever a proud, self-reliant, deter- 
mined race, with much intensity of feeling lurking 
under cover of great reserve. Of one of these, James 
Carlyle, mason and afterwards farmer, there was born 
on December 4, 1795, the boy who was to become the 
greatest English prose-writer of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. Thomas was the eldest of a^ family of nine 
children. The home of these Carlyles was at first 
Ecclef echan, a poor little village of a single street ; 
yet the Firth was spread out in sight before it, and 
the noble Cumberland mountains rose beyond. Three 
other homes in the vicinity — all of them farms — 
were successively occupied by the Carlyles during 
later years ; but Ecclefechan was the family centre, 
and there the ashes of most of that household now 
sleep in its little churchyard. The father was a man 
of mental ability really remarkable in view of his 
limited opportunities ; deeply religious, but outwardly 
stern and distant. ^^We had all to complain that 
we dared not freely love him.'' He discerned, how- 
ever, the promise there was in the boy, and out of his 
scanty resources spared no sacrifice to educate him, 
first at the village school, then at Annan a few miles 
distant, and lastly at Edinburgh. In this he was 
warmly seconded by the mother, who hoped with a 
yearning known only to a Scottish mother, to see her 



X THOMAS CABLYLE. 

son one day a minister of the gospel. Carlyle was 
an eager student of uncommon powers ; but like 
Milton, and many another man of original bent, he 
looked back upon the whole scheme and outcome of 
his academic study with profound dissatisfaction, as 
wholly unfitted to the needs of an immortal spirit. 
His impression is vividly recorded in Sartor Resartusy 
Book II. chapter iii. He was of a profoundly re- 
ligious nature, yet could find no comfort or rest in 
the hard, narrow creed of his fathers. He would not 
palter with his convictions, and soon found himself 
compelled to turn from the career that had been so 
fondly planned for him. A prophet and a preacher 
of righteousness he was indeed to-be — perhaps the 
most powerful of all his day — bat not of the regular 
form and office. 

CHOICE OF A PROFESSION. 

At the close of his university course, Carlyle was 
eighteen years old. For the next five years he taught 
— at Annan in his own old Grammar School, and 
then in Perthshire, — spending his spare hours and 
his long vacations at home in ceaseless study. Dur- 
ing this time he came to know the gifted but ill-fated 
Edward Irving, the friend whose fortunes were to be 
so strangely linked with his own, — the one man of 



INTRODUCTION. xi 

all his actual acquaintance whom he seems to have 
regarded with unfeigned admiration, and whose 
memory he cherished with unabated devotion and 
tenderness to the end. 

Carlyle found out at length that " school-master- 
ing " was as unsatisfying to his eager spirit as was 
the ministry, and he turned next to the law. For 
two years he studied it in Edinburgh, supporting 
himself meagrely on his scanty savings eked out by 
private coaching. Incessant mental effort with im- 
proper nourishment now brought upon him that 
dyspepsia which was thenceforth to be his lifelong 
enemy and torment. After two years' experiment 
the law also was abandoned, and at twenty-five he 
was thinking of literature — ^^ timorously '^ indeed, 
as he himself tells us, and with no illusions ; but 
fortunately too with no clear vision of the years of 
martyrdom he must endure ere he should win the 
crown. At first the way seemed not so hard. A 
modest beginning of writing was made along various 
lines of hack-work, — articles for an encyclopaedia 
and sundry translations. 

Searchings of Spirit, 

About this time he became the subject of a memor- 
able spiritual experience, akin perhaps to what is 



Xll THOMAS CAELYLE. 

commonly called conversion, or reminding one even 
of the temptation in the wilderness. One day in 
June, 1821, as in darkness and despair he was walking 
the streets, the cringing demon of doubt that long 
had tormented him was, in a moment of strange 
exaltation, vanquished and cast out. Carlyle's own 
account may be read in the Sartor, Book II., chapter 
vii. Next year, through the kindness of his friend 
Irving, now in London and rising to the summit of 
his fame as a preacher, Carlyle secured a very desir- 
able position as private tutor in a wealthy and 
cultured English family, residing for the time in 
Edinburgh and its vicinity. The position gave 
him for some three years the very things he needed 
most, — not merely subsistence, leisure for his own 
studies, and the means to help on in turn the educa- 
tion of his next younger brother, but a life-long 
friendship with his bright young pupil, and a near 
acquaintance with the life of polite society. The 
episode was fittingly closed with a visit of some 
months to London itself, including a glimpse of the 
literary celebrities of the day, and flying trips to 
various places in England and even to Paris. Never 
was there a keener pair of eyes than his to see, or a 
heart more sure to retain ; but it is characteristic that 
all this sudden vision of worldly splendor and fame 



INTRODUCTION. xiii 

nowise dazzled the young man, or tempted him to bow 
down and worship. With revulsion, rather, and con- 
tempt for its hollowness, he turned to follow the 
vision within which was leading him on. 

He was now twenty -nine years old. From the age 
of ten, study and thought had been the one business 
of Jtiis; lif e. To it he had brought a keen and power- 
ful iipLtelligence, a memory tenacious almost beyond 
belief^ and ^ — what is rarer still — an absolute inde- 
pendence of judgment. To his natural gifts had 
been added the mastery and the method of scholarly 
training — no small matter, however much he might 
despise it. He had traversed a wide range of topics, 
and through them had come inevitably upon the 
master-topic of all — the human problem, — and to 
that in its profoundest aspect, the spiritual, — the 
aspect touched by religion, philosophy, and poetry. 
For five years he had been unweariedly exploring the 
great mine of German thought, then almost unknown 
to Englishmen. As first-fruits of these labors he had 
published a Life of Schiller and a translation of 
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. The translation is ac- 
counted to be one of the very best prose translations 
of any considerable extent that the world has ever 
seen, and it brought a most flattering acknowledg- 
ment from Goethe himself, then still alive at Weimar. 



XIV THOMAS CAELYLE, 

This vein was inexhaustible ; there seemed to be en- 
couragement to work it further ; and work on it should 
naturally lead out to substantive work of his own. 
The consciousness of great powers and of a great 
message to utter was surging within him, and the 
consciousness was confirmed by the judgment of those 
he knew might be trusted. One thing, however, he 
had covenanted with himself, — and here was the 
secret of his long neglect by the world, as well as of 
his ultimate triumph. Of the insincerity of the 
world, and especially of the literary world, he had 
seen enough. With it he would have no truce. 
Never, not even to win the pittance which should 
keep him alive, would he write otherwise than as 
from his heart he believed. It was a knightly vow, 
and in knightly fashion was it kept. 

MARRIAGE. 

Jane Welsh, 

Toward the keeping of this vow Carlyle was soon 
to find most effective assistance. On the other side 
of Scotland, though of Dumfriesshire stock on her 
mother's side, there had grown up a bright and beau- 
tiful girl, the idol of her household and of all who 
knew her — Jane Baillie Welsh. In her mere girl- 
hood she had met and known Carlyle's friend, Edward 



INTRODUCTION. XV 

Irving, who was for some time master of the school 
at Haddington, her home, and who was engaged to 
direct her studies privately as well. The contact be- 
tween the fervid mystic and the brilliant, gifted girl, 
was electric for both, though neither yet knew it. 
Irving removed to another school, and drifted into an 
engagement there ; the girl grew up to womanhood. 
Both found at length that they were passionate 
lovers ; but it was too late. The rigid morality of 
that folk counted the promise to marry as only less 
binding than the wedding vow itself ; it was not to be 
broken save by the free consent of both the parties. 
The promised wife would not release him. On that 
side no place could be found for repentance, though he 
sought it diligently and with tears. Nor would Jane 
under these circumstances for a moment think of 
marrying him. From the shock and wrench she 
never entirely recovered ; to Irving it was ultimate 
ruin. Carlyle knew of the engagement elsewhere, 
and was therefore without suspicion of the real state 
of affairs between Irving and Miss Welsh. He be- 
came acquainted with Miss Welsh through Irving 
himself, while on a holiday visit with him to Had- 
dington. Erom the first the two were strongly at- 
tracted to each other. Both were alike aspirants to 
literature. She was a woman among ten thousand, 



XVI THOMAS CARLYLE. 

of forceful character, keen practical sense, graco, wit, 
scholarship, spirit. He, poor student and teacher 
though he was, was a genius rarer still ; and her 
quick insight divined it. That proud and gifted 
creature's lot in life henceforth was to be not compan- 
ion indeed, as she once fondly dreamed, but servitor 
and ministrant to that lonely genius ; to keep it ever 
braced to its high destiny ; through poverty, toil, and 
sickness of body and of heart, to make sure that 
nothing stood in the way of its full achievement ; — 
and to sink exhausted when at last the pinnacle of 
fame was reached ! Admiration it surely was on her 
part, self-sacrifice, devotion unexampled and, alas, but 
poorly repaid ; but it was something other than the 
affectionate tenderness of common love. 

The acquaintance ripened slowly through five years. 
There was much entirely natural hesitation on her 
part, for she saw dimly at least something of that 
which was before her. But at last she was " resolved 
in spirit, in spite of every horrible fate," — and took 
him " for better, for worse.'' They lived a year in 
Edinburgh, forming valuable associations, literary and 
other. With a paper on Jean Paul Richter and one 
on German literature in the Edinburgh Review of 
this year (1827) Carlyle began ^^ that long series of 
splendid historical and critical essays which set him 



INTRODUCTION, ^ xvii 

in the front of the reviewers of the century/^ Three 
other articles, likewise on German topics, were pub- 
lished in other magazines. 

CRAIGEIS^PUTTOCK. 

It was a hopeful beginning ; but life in Edinburgh 
was too expensive for their limited resources, and too 
distracting for the development of the deeper thoughts 
which Carljle now felt struggling to birth within 
him. To make sure of provision for her widowed 
mother, Jane Welsh had settled upon her for her life- 
time the whole of her own inheritance with the ex- 
ception of a little lonely farm far up between the 
western arms of the ]^ith, the westernmost stream in 
Dumfriesshire. This farm was Craigenputtock, quite 
isolated among dreary moors — no other human habi- 
tation ill sight, and the nearest town and source of 
supplies or help fifteen miles away ! Thither, though 
not without misgivings on Mrs. Carlyle's part, it was 
decided to retreat ; and in this banishment were 
spent six weary years of loneliness unutterable — 
unendurable, it would have been but for the high 
resolve and the unflinching determination of those 
proud spirits. There was almost nothing of com- 
panionship even, that solace of spirits in direst 
extremity ; for to Carlyle writing and thinking were 



xviii THOMAS CARLYLE. 

possible only in solitude, — shut up in his study or 
out upon the moors. There were, to be sure, some 
brief intermissions, — a visit of both to London in 
the winter of 1831-32, a shorter one of Carlyle only 
to Edinburgh in 1833, and an occasional visit received, 
like that of Emerson, who alighted at their door one 
day as if he had dropped from the sky. But the 
ordeal was bitter indeed ; and bitterest alas for her 
who must only watch and wait, unsustained by the 
excitement of creative effort. The record of it can 
scarcely be read now without tears. But ^^ beyond 
the Alps lies Italy,'' and beyond the desolate moors 
of Craigenputtock lay London and immortal fame ! 

The Essay on Burns and Sartor Resartus. 

The productions of this cruel apprenticeship are 
all famous now, though it was difficult or even im- 
possible then to secure publication for them on any 
terms. Among them all two stand forth with special 
prominence. One is the earliest of the group, writ- 
ten under the circumstances described further on 
(p. xxii), the serene and perfect gem of appreciative 
criticism which is here presented — the Essay on 
Burns. The other is the weird and thrilling Sartor 
Resartusy written flaming from the heart of a prophet 
and seer — a work absolutely unique in literature. 



INTRODUCTION. xix 

^^ It is a work of genius, dear ! " said Jane Welsh 
Carlyle, as she finished the reading of the manu- 
script, and her verdict the world has abundantly 
sustained."^ 

CAREER IN LONDON. 

t 

The rest of our story may be more briefly told. 
In 1834 the Carlyles removed to London, which was 
thenceforth their permanent home. Literary success 
was presently assured, and friends came flocking 
about them; yet for some time the income from 
literary work was pitifully small. In 1836 the long- 
delayed Sartor first saw light as a complete book in 
an American edition with a introduction by Emerson. 
In 1837 appeared his French Revolution, the crown- 
ing work of a series of French studies begun in 
Craigenputtock. To eke out his scanty resources he 
delivered during the years 1837-1840 four courses of 
public lectures, which attracted much attention. The 
last of the four was his famous Heroes and Hero- 
Worship, From this time on the problem of support 
was no longer harassing. The conviction had long 

* The young reader who is now making his first acquaintance with 
Carlyle, and who is moved to know him further and in more charac- 
teristic vein, should read tlie Sartor with the help furnished in the 
admirable edition by MacMechan, of the Athenseum Press Series. 



XX THOMAS CARLYLE. 

since taken root in his mind that the greatest need of 
human life and society was not so much liberty as 
efficient direction. As a consequence his interest 
was more and more strongly centred upon types of 
masterful men, and these became the chief topics of 
his writing. Especially to be noted in this great 
gallery of portraits are his Letters and Speeches of 
Oliver Cromwell (1845), and the monumental Fred- 
erick the Great (1865). 

Carlyle was now at the summit of his fame. 
Public honors, showered thick upon him, were for 
the most part declined ; but one of these — his elec- 
tion as Lord Rector of his own University of Edin- 
burgh — deeply touched him, and was accepted. His 
inaugural address — the only real duty of the office 
— was received with unprecedented enthusiasm. 
Stern old Scotia pressed to her heart her exiled son. 
This was April 2, 1866, — the proudest day of his life. 

In the midst of all this triumph the stroke of fate 
was impending. While Carlyle lingered for a few 
days in the home of his boyhood, the stroke fell. 
Jane Welsh Carlyle was no more. Fifteen years of 
lonely life remained for him ; his hand indeed had 
not lost its cunning, but his heart could never again 
be braced to serious work. His declining years were 
comforted by the loving care of his niece Mary Aiken, 



INTRODUCTION. ' XXI 

and by the tender regard of all who knew him. The 
end came peacefully at last, Feb. 2, 1881. 



II. THE ESSAY ON BUE:^S. 

ITS HISTORY. t 

Carlyle's Essay on Burns appeared in December 
1828 as the leading article in the Edinburgh Review, 
No. 96. While the scope of the Beview was by no 
means limited to the criticism of books, it was never- 
theless its editorial tradition to speak only upon 
such topics as had been formally brought before the 
literary world through the recent publication of books. 
Articles therefore did not appear in the Review under 
heading of their real topics, but under the titles of 
the books which served as their occasion or text. 
The heading of our present essay was accordingly 
as follows : — 

Art. I. The Life of Robert Burns. By J. G. 
Lockhart, LL.B. Edinburgh, 1828. 

But the book so announced as text might lightly be 
dismissed, leaving the writer free to deal with the 
matter from his own point of view; and this is pre- 
cisely what Carlyle has done. To his brother he 



xxii THOMAS CARLYLE. 

wrote : " Lockhart has written a kind of * Life of 
Burns/ and men in general were making another up- 
roar about Burns. It is this book, a trivial one 
enough, which I am to pretend reviewing.'' The re- 
view proper is found to be limited to a single para- 
graph, and that by no means so ungracious as the 
epithet '' trivial '' would seem to promise. 

The paper is, as Froude says, " one of the very best 
of his essays." The subject was congenial, appealing 
strongly to his sympathies both national and personal. 
The moment too was propitious. Carlyle by this time 
had found his power. He was master of an utterance 
original and striking, but not yet obscured by the ex- 
travagance and grotesqueness of his later style. The 
prospect of an assured literary career was brightening 
before him. His health seemed improving under 
the regime of his new home. Even the isolation of 
Craigenputtock, so dreary and depressing to his wife 
gave him the opportunity he had not found in Edin- 
burgh for solitary musing and uninterrupted work. 
All these circumstances combined to make the summer 
months of 1828 an interval of serenity in a life whose 
inward aspect was usually stormy enough; and the 
effect of them is seen in a certain quietness of tone, 
a graciousness of manner, a temperateness of judg- 
ment, a pervading tenderness and pathos which dis- 



INTRODUCTION, xxiii 

tinguish this essay above all others that Carlyle has 
written. 

At this time Francis Jeffrey had been sole editor of 
the Edinburgh Review for twenty-five years, — almost, 
in fact, from its very beginning. He was a clever and 
brilliant man of the world, sure of himself and of 
what he knew and felt. Carlyle he had warmly be- 
friended, had recognized his talents, had recently 
published two of his articles in the Review ; but the 
brooding mysticism and the spiritual aspirations of the 
young author he could not sympathize with, — could 
not even understand. To him they were, as Froude 
says, the " most absurd and provoking of illusions.'^ 
The article on Burns he found far too '' long and dif- 
fuse,'^ its diction '' verbose and prone to exaggeration.'' 
He proceeded therefore to deal with it in characteristic 
fashion — excising, inserting, amending; — so that 
when Carlyle saw the proofs, ^^the first part was all 
in shreds — the body of a quadruped with the head 
of a bird, a man shortened by cutting out his thighs and 
fixing the knee-caps on the hips.'' Carlyle protested ; 
'^the paper might be cancelled, but should not be 
mutilated." And Jeffrey, unused though he was to 
such audacious defiance of his authority, for once 
yielded ; and fortunately we have the paper in the 
main as Carlyle wrote it, — '' very few and temperate 



XXIV THOMAS CARLYLE. 

corrections '' excepted, as Jeffrey took pains to stipu- 
late. What some of these corrections were we may 
have occasion to conjecture as we read. 

ITS STRUCTURE. 

The logical structure of the essay is essentially 
simple, as the following analysis will show ; — 
Introduction. 

a) The published Lives of Burns. 

h) The life itself — its wonder and pathos. 

I. Burns' Poetry. 

a) Its basis in the character of the man. 

6) Its rank and quality. 

c) Its influence on English literature. 

II. His Life. 

a) Its splendid promise, its troubled course, its tragic 

ending. 
h) The causes of its shipwreck. 
Conclusion. 

Byron and Burns : — the lessons to be drawn from these 
sad examples. 

SUMMARY OF ITS THOUGHT. 

Such a skeleton gives, of course, no adequate idea 
of anything beyond the topics considered, their articu- 
lation with each other, and the disposition of the 
masses of material. To show more exactly the nature 



INTRODUCTION, XXV 

of Carlyle's thought upon each of these topics is the 
purpose of the following summary : — 

Introduction. A growing interest in Burns ap- 
pears in many ways, but especially in the constant 
succession of published Lives, We are still too near 
the poet's times for a true interpretation and a final 
estimate of him ; and all attempts so far fall visibly 
short of the mark. Even Lockhart's recent work, 
excellent as it is, deals too exclusively with facts 
and documents, and does not sufficiently reveal the 
man. 

Transition. The character of Burns is one which 
well deserves our effort to understand and interpret 
it. His noble inborn powers, the fearful odds against 
which these were matched, the splendor of his poetic 
gift, the richness and charm of his personality, and 
the tragedy of his life, challenge alike our wonder 
and our tears. 

I. The characteristics of his poetry are : — First, 
sincerity J — a quality rare even among poets. He 
speaks only what he feels. Second, vision^ the power 
to discern the true subjects of poetry in the life 
which he actually knows. Third, poetic feeling , the 
clear and prompt response of his heart to every note 
of his experience. To these qualities of the man are 
due the vividness of his description, his striking force 



XXVI THOMAS CAELYLE. 

of expression, the wide range of his sympathy, and 
his unique humor. 

Not all of his work is pure poetry, — not even some 
of his most famous pieces ; but his songs are immor- 
tal. And it is not too much to say that Burns has 
given to all our literature a powerful impulse toward 
healthy nationalism and toward a firm basis in reality. 

II. Our chief interest, however, centres in the 
man himself — his splendid promise, his pitiful ship- 
wreck. Burns never attained to real manhood, nor 
to the singleness of aim which manhood implies. In 
spite of toil and privation, his childhood was happy 
and wholesome. But his initiation into the louder, 
looser life of the world was of fateful import, — and 
the loss of the safeguards of religion at the very 
moment when he needed them most. Soon in dis- 
grace and desperation he was ready to flee from his 
native land. From this abyss he was suddenly lifted 
into fame ; he became for a while the pet of the great 
and the learned, bearing himself throughout the try- 
ing ordeal with surprising good sense and dignity. 
But the nine days' wonder came to an end, and the 
problem of life must be faced anew. He began now 
wisely, so far as we can judge, and kindly; but through 
ambition and distracting excitements he soon lost his 
true aim and his peace of mind, and with these all 



INTB OB UC TlOJSr. XXVll 

possibility of maturity for his genius. Thenceforth 
the crisis was inevitable, and death perhaps was the 
kindliest form in which it could come. 

What was the cause of this sad shipwreck ? Not 
outward circumstance of poverty or neglect ; for over 
these he might have triumphed as many another 
genius has done. The real cause "v^as within himself, 
— his lack of firm religious principle, and the divided 
aim of his life. 

Conclusion. In his case, as in Byron's, pity for 
his weakness must mingle with our love and admira- 
tion. The true poet must indeed make his life a 
poem ; but the world should see to it that its own im- 
pertinent interference does not prevent that consum- 
mation. 

ITS POETICAL FEATURES. 

But an essay like this on Burns is something far 
more than a series of logical and critical statements. 
It is instinct with the glow of life, the warmth of 
feeling, the play of fancy and imagination, the power 
and charm of poetry. Indeed, one of the best uses 
that can be made by the student of a summary like 
that above, is, by careful comparison of it with the 
text to gain some idea of the methods and resources 
of real art, some sense of the vast difference there is 



XXVlll THOMAS CARLYLE. 

between the ineffectiveness of bare, cold thought and 
its illuminating and kindling power when touched by 
the spirit of a master. Our essay belongs in fact to 
that class of writings which it has become the fashion 
to call ^^appreciations/' writings whose charm is a 
double one — the charm indeed of a noble object pre- 
sented to our view, but curiously blended with and 
heightened by the charm of the writer's personality 
and feeling therein revealed. It is subjective as well 
as objective ; it is lyrical as well as demonstrative ; it 
is Carlyle as well as Burns. Many passages in this 
essay are pure poetry, notably that fine "apprecia- 
tion " of the poet's life which forms the transition as 
marked above; and considerations which are poetical 
rather than purely logical, have determined the treat- 
ment throughout. 

DATES IN THE LIFE OF BURNS. 

Carlyle's interest in his Essay on Burns, centres 
wholly upon the tragedy of a gifted soul, — in which 
connection matters of place and time seem to him of 
little moment. Not a single date does he give, and 
there is no more than passing indication of place. 
Some acquaintance, however, with the facts of Burns' 
life is clearly presumed, and the following brief sum- 
mary may in part supply the need. 



INTRODUCTION, XXlX 

Eobert Burns was born Jan. 25, 1759, in a little 
clay cabin near Alloway Kirk, a short distance south 
of the town of Ayr. Three later homes of the family 
during Burns' youth were all at no great remove : 
Mt. Oliphant (1766-77), a little to the south ; Loch- 
lea (1777-1784), and Mossgiel (1784-85) somewhat 
farther to the north-east. In his fifteenth year there 
came to the lad his first touch of romance and his 
first notes of song. The episode of his stay in Irvine 
with its fateful results (pp. 64-66) was in 1781. 

His father's death in 1784 was followed by a great 
upheaval of powers and passions within him. Then 
came the first free flowering of his poetic genius; 
then came also that period of wild and lawless living 
the wounds of which were never healed. His first 
volume of poems was published in July, 1786, on the 
eve of his intended flight from Scotland. The next 
two winters were spent in Edinburgh, where the 
second edition of his poems appeared in April, 1787. 
The intervening summer and autumn were spent in 
visits to various parts of Scotland. In 1788 he was 
married to Jean Armour, and established himself at 
Ellisland, Dumfriesshire, combining farming with 
the duties of an exciseman. In 1791 he gave up 
the farm, and moved to the town of Dumfries. In 
1792 occurred the incident which brought him into 



XXX THOMAS CARLYLE. 

trouble with the Excise Commissioners. His death 
was on July 21, 1796. 



III. SUGGESTIOISrS TO THE TEACHEE. 

The teacher's preparation for undertaking the study 
of this essay with a class should give him first of all 
a fresh and firm grasp of the' material here dealt 
with — the facts of the life, the character, and the 
works of Burns ; and, second, an acquaintance with 
the spirit, the temper, and the habits of thought of 
the one who interprets for us this material. For the 
first, one should know Lockhart's Life of Burns, — the 
work which was the occasion of this essay, if not pre- 
cisely its basis, — Burns' Poems, the more impor- 
tant Letters, and some modern Life of the poet with 
critical review and estimate, such as that of Principal 
Shairp. Eor the second, Sartor Resartus, Heroes and 
Hero Worship, and some recent study of Carlyle like 
that of Nichol, might serve at least as a beginning. 

For the conduct of the class the best possible sug- 
gestion is doubtless to keep ever in mind the ends of 
all such study: — information, inspiration, utterance. 
Nor are these ends to be separately sought ; but to- 
gether, as mutually dependent and cumulative. 



INTRODUCTION. XXxi 

Clearer understanding should lead to quicker and 
truer feeling, and these together should prompt to 
freer expression ; while, on the other hand, the very 
effort to express should clarify both thought and feel- 
ing. Nevertheless, since quickened feeling comes 
through sympathy and, so to speak, through a sort 
of noble contagion, it were v\^ell to m'ake sure that the 
noble contagion be ever present — yet not too ob- 
trusively, and especially not too effusively present — 
in the heart of the teacher. The main weight of pre- 
scription therefore may well rest upon the other two, 
if only this be never forgotten or neglected, or made 
impossible even, through the distaste which follows 
too mechanical a treatment along the other lines. 

The Essay on Burns offers an unusually rich field 
for such study as is here suggested. First of all, sim- 
ple as it seems, its thought lies by no means always 
on the surface ; the expression is often allusive, sug- 
gestive, pregnant, symbolic, requiring attention to ex- 
plicate it ; for in such cases familiarity with the terms 
used by no means makes sure that the precise import 
of the whole is not missed. In the second place, the 
admirable structure, both larger and smaller, affords 
opportunities for profitable study which are by no 
means exhausted in the brief outline which is given 
on p. xxiv. Especially is it worth while to note now 



XXXll THOMAS CARLYLE, 

and then how the strictly logical outline is modified 
in the interest of emphasis or of feeling — in short 
by artistic considerations. But beyond all these for- 
mal matters lies that which is for this study the most 
important point of all ; namely, that our pupils have 
here a noble introduction to criticism as well as a no- 
ble example of it. The criticism is both of literature 
and of life. Its criteria, its methods, its terms, and its 
results are set forth with uncommon clearness and 
simplicity. The study of the essay will by no means 
be complete until it has opened up somewhat of this 
great realm of thought to the understanding and the 
interest of the student, — until, according to his meas- 
ure and power, he has arrived at some clear sense of 
the import of the critical terms and distinctions here 
illustrated and expounded, and at some ability to 
apply them himself in similar cases. 

A single reading of course will not suffice for the 
development of study along all these lines. It may 
be well, therefore, during the first reading to make 
sure of the informational side — the understanding 
of the thought in its detail, — accompanying this with 
appropriate oral discussion and brief restatement ; and 
to reserve for the second reading the larger features 
of comparison, synthesis, and criticism, with written 
exercises to supplement and enforce them. 



INTRODUCTION, xxxiii 

IV. BIBLIOGEAPHY. 

CARLYLE. 

The record of Carlyle's life, as^ may be guessed 
from what has already been said, is a record of spirit- 
ual experiences and crises rather than of outward cir- 
cumstance or events. It may be read in all its most 
intimate detail — too intimate perhaps — in the 
volumes of his Life, his Reminiscences , and the 
Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle^ edited 
by his friend and literary executor, James Anthony 
Froude ; and in the five volumes of correspondence 
edited by Charles Eliot ISTorton. If to these be 
added the two volumes of Memoirs by E. H. Shep- 
herd, we shall have named almost all the published 
authorities for the Life of Carlyle. A careful sum- 
mary of the life, with judicial estimate of the man, 
his place in literature, and his influence, will be found 
in Nicholas Carlyle in the English Men of Letters 
Series. A later and briefer Life by Eichard Garnett 
is especially valuable for its excellent index and 
bibliography. A good short article is that by Leslie 
Stephen in the Dictionary of National Biography. 
But the mass of literature which has grown up about 



XXXIV THOMAS CARLTLE. 

the life and the thought of Carlyle is enormous, and 
cannot even be noticed further here. 

The best available edition of Carlyle's collected 
works is the Centenary edition (^Scribiiers, 1896), in 
thirty volumes. These volumes may also be pur- 
chased separately. A cheaper edition is that of 
Chapman & Hall (London, 1900), in eleven volumes. 
Separate v^orks of Carlyle may novr be had in almost 
numberless editions. 

BURNS. 

As for Burns, all the authorities now accessible 
w^ill be found collated in his Complete Works, edited 
by W. S. Douglas, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1893). The best 
edition of his Poetical Works is that of W. S. Douglas 
(Sonnenscheiiiy 1890). A good, inexpensive edition 
of his poems, letters, and songs is the G-lobe edition 
(Macviillan). Lockhart's Life of Burns may be had 
in Bohn's edition. The best short Lives with critical 
estimate are those by Principal Shairp (English Men 
of Letters) and J. Stuart Blackie (Great Writers V 



THOMAS CARLYLE'S ESSAY 
ON BURNS.^ 



j In the modern arrangements of society, it is no 
uncommon thing that a man of genius must, like 
Butler, ' ask for bread and receive a stone ' ; for, 
in spite of our grand maxim of supply and de- 
mand, it is by no means the highest excellence 5 
that men are most forward to recognize. The 
inventor of a spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his 
reward in his own day ; but the writer of a true 
poem, like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly 
as sure of the contrary. We do not know whether ^q 
it is not an aggravation of the injustice, that there 
is generally a posthumous retribution. Robert 
Burns, in the course of Nature, might yet have 
been living; but his short life was spent in toil 

1 Edinburgh Review, No. 96. — The lAfe of Robert Burns. By J, G. 
Lockhart, LL.B. Edinburgh, 1828. 

1 



2 THOMAS CARLYLE, 

and penury; and he died, in the prime of his man- 
hood, miserable and neglected : and yet already 
a brave mausoleum shines over his dust, and more 
than one splendid monument has been reared in 

5 other places to his fame ; the street where he lan- 
guished in poverty is called by his name ; the 
highest personages in our literature have been 
proud to appear as his commentators and ad- 
mirers ; and here is the sixth narrative of his Life 

10 that has been given to the world ! 

Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize 
for this new attempt on such a subject : but his 
readers, we believe, will readily acquit him ; or, at 
worst, will censure only the performance of his 

15 task, not the choice of it. The character of Burns, 
indeed, is a theme that cannot easily become either 
trite or exhausted ; and will probably gain rather 
than lose in its dimensions by the distance to 
which it is removed by Time. (No man, it has 

20 been said, is a hero to his valet) and this is proba- 
bly true ; but the fault is at least as likely to be 
the valet's as the hero's. For it is certain, that" 
to the vulgar eye few things are wonderful that 
are not distant. It is difficult for men to believe 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 3 

that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay, 
perhaps painfully feel, toiling at their side through 
the poor jostlings of existence, can be made of 
finer clay than themselves.. Suppose that some 
dining acquaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and 6 
neighbor of John a Combe's, -had snatched an 
hour or two from the preservation of his game, 
and written us a Life of Shakspeare ! What dis- 
sertations should we not have had, — not on ITam- 
let and The Tempest^ but on the wool-trade, and 10 
deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant laws ; and 
how the Poacher became a Player ; and how Sir 
Thomas and Mr. John had Christian bowels, and 
did not push him to extremities ! In like manner, 
we believe, with respect to Burns, that till the 15 
companions of his pilgrimage, the Honorable Ex- 
cise Commissioners, and the Gentlemen of the 
Caledonian Hunt, and the Dumfries Aristocracy, 
and all the Squires and -Earls, equally with the 
Ayr Writers, and the New and Old Light Clergy, 20 
whom he had to do with, shall have become invis- 
ible in the darkness of the Past, or visible only 
by light borrowed from his juxtaposition, it will 
be difficult to measure him by any true standard. 



4 THOMAS CARLYLE, 

or to estimate what he really was and did, in the 
eighteenth century, for his country and the world. 
It will be difficult, we say ; but still a fair problem 
for literary historians ; and repeated attempts will 

5 give us repeated approximations. 

•^ His former Biographers have done something, 

■^ no doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist 
us. Dr. Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal of 
these writers, have both, we think, mistaken one 

10 essentially important thing : Their own and the 
world's true relation to their author, and the style 
in which it became such men to think and to speak 
of such a man. Dr. Currie loved the poet truly : 
more perhaps than he avowed to his readers, or 

16 even to himself ; yet he everywhere introduces 
him with a certain patronizing, apologetic air ; as 
if the polite public might tliink it strange and half 
unwarrantable that he, a man of science, a scholar 
and gentleman, should do such honor to a rustic. 

•20 In all this, however, we readily admit that his 
fault was not want of love, but weakness of faith ; 
and regret that the first and kindest of all our 
poet's biographers should not have seen farther, or 
believed more boldly what he saw. Mr. Walker 



SSSAY ON BUBJSrS. 5 

offends more deeply in the same kind : and both 
err alike in presenting us with a detached cata- 
logue of his several supposed attributes, virtues 
and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting 
character as a living unity. This, however, is not 5 
painting a portrait; but gauging the length and 
breadth of the several features, and jotting down 
their dimensions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it 
is not so much as that : for we are yet to learn by 
what arts or instruments the mind could be so 10 
measured and gauged. 
U Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided 
both these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as 
the high and remarkable man the public voice has 
now pronounced him to be : and in delineating 15 
him, he has avoided the method of separate gen- 
eralities, and rather sought for characteristic in- 
cidents, habits, actions, sayings ; in a word, for 
aspects which exhibit the whole man, as he looked 
and lived among his fellows. The book accord- 20 
ingly, with all its deficiencies, gives more insight, 
we think, into the true character of Burns, than 
any prior biography : though, being written on the 
very popular and condensed scheme of an article 



6 THOMAS CARLYLE, 

for Constalles Miseellariy^ it has less depth than 
we could have wished and expected from a writer 
of such power; and contains rather more, and 
more multifarious quotations than belong of right 

5 to an original production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart's 
own writing is generally so good, so clear, direct 
and nervous, that we seldom wish to see it making 
place for another man's. However, the spirit of 
the work is throughout candid, tolerant and 

10 anxiously conciliating ; compliments and praises 
are liberally distributed, on all hands, to great and 
small ; and, as ]\Ir. Morris Bii'kbeck observes of 
the society in the backwoods of America, ' the 
courtesies of polite life are never lost sight of for 

15 a moment.' But there are better things than 
these in the volume ; and we can safely testify, 
not only that it is easily and pleasantly read a 
first time, but may even be without difficulty read 
again. 

20 < Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the 
problem of Burns's Biography has yet been ad- 
equately solved. We do not allude so much to 
deficiency of facts or documents, — though of 
these Ave are still every day receiving some fresh 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 7 

accession, — as to the limited and imperfect appli- 
cation of them to the great end of Biography. 
Our notions upon this subject may perhaps appear 
extravagant ; but if an individual is really of con- 
sequence enough to have his life and character 5 
recorded for public remembrance, we have always 
been of opinion that the public ought to be made 
acquainted with all the inward springs and re- 
lations of his character. How did the world and 
man's life, from his particular position, represent 10 
themselves to his mind ? How did coexisting cir- 
cumstances modify him from without ; how did he 
modify these from within ? With what endeavors 
and what efficacy rule over them ; with what re- 
sistance and what suffering sink under them ? In 16 
one word, what and how produced was the effect 
of society on him; what and how produced was 
his effect on society? He who should answer 
these questions, in regard to any individual, would, 
as we believe, furnish a model of perfection in 20 
Biography. Few individuals, indeed, can deserve 
such a study ; and many lives will be written, and, 
for the gratification of innocent curiosity, ought to 
be written, and read and forgotten, which are not 



8 THOMAS CAELYLE, 

in this sense hiographies. But Burns, if we mis- 
take not, is one of these few individuals ; and such 
a study, at least with such a result, he has not yet 
obtained. Our own contributions to it, we are 
6 aware, can be but scanty and feeble ; but we offer 
them with good-will, and trust they may meet 
with acceptance from those they are intended for. 

, Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy ; 
and was, in that character, entertained by it, in 

10 the usual fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous 
wonder, speedily subsiding into censure and neg- 
lect; till his early and most mournful death again 
awakened an enthusiasm for him, which, especially 
as there was now nothing to be done, and much to 

15 be spoken, has prolonged itself even to our own 
time. It is true, the ' nine days ' have long since 
elapsed ; and the very continuance of this clamor 
proves that Burns was no vulgar wonder. Ac- 
cordingly, even in sober judgments, where, as 

20 years passed by, he has come to rest more and 
more exclusively on his own intrinsic merits, and 
may now be well-nigh shorn of that casual radi- 
ance, he appears not only as a true British poet. 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 9 

but as one of the most considerable British men 
of the eighteenth century. Let it not be objected 
that he did little. He did much, if we consider 
where and how. If the work performed was small, 
we must remember that he had his very materials 5 
to discover; for the metal he worked in lay hid 
under the desert moor, where no eye but his had 
guessed its existence ; and we may almost say, 
that with his own hand he had to construct the 
tools for fashioning it. For he found himself in lo 
deepest obscurity, without help, 'without instruc- 
tion, without model ; or with models only of the 
meanest sort. An educated man stands, as it 
were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and 
magazine, filled with all the weapons and engines 15 
which man's skill has been able to devise from the 
earliest time ; and he works, accordingly, with a 
strength borrowed from all past ages. How dif- 
ferent is his state who stands on the outside of 
that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be 20 
stormed, or remain forever shut against him ! His 
means are the commonest and rudest; the mere 
work done is no measure of his strength. A 
dwarf behind his steam-engine may remove moun- 



10 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

tains ; but no dwarf will hew them down with a 
pickaxe ; and he must be a Titan that hurls them 
abroad wdth his arms. 

It is in this last shape that Burns presents him- 

5 self. Born in an age the most prosaic Britain 
had yet seen, and in a condition the most disad- 
vantageous, where his mind, if it accomplished 
aught, must accomplish it under the pressure of 
continual bodily toil, nay, of penury and despond- 

10 ing apprehension of the worst evils, and with no 
furtherance but such knowledge as dwells in a 
poor man's hut, and the rhymes of a Fergusson or 
Ramsay for his standard of beauty, he sinks not 
under all these impediments : through the fogs 

15 and darkness of that obscure region, his lynx eye 
discerns the true relations of the world and human 
life ; he grows into intellectual strength, and trains 
himself into intellectual expertness. Impelled by 
the expansive movement of his own irrepressible 

20 soul, he struggles forward into the general view ; 
and with haughty modesty lays doAvn before us, as 
the fruit of his labor, a gift, which Time has now 
pronounced imperishable. Add to all this, that 
his darksome drudging childhood and youth was 



ESSAY ON BUBJSrS. 11 

by far the kindliest era of his whole life ; and that 
he died in his thirty-seventh year: and then ask, 
If it be strange that his poems are imperfect, and 
of small extent, or that his genius attained no 
mastery in its art ? Alas, his Sun shone as 5 
through a tropical tornado ; and the pale Shadow 
of Death eclipsed it at noon ! Shrouded in such 
baleful vapors, the genius of Burns was never 
seen in clear azure splendor, enlightening the 
world : but some beams from it did, by fits, pierce lo 
through ; and it tinted those clouds with rainbow 
and orient colors, into a glory and stern grandeur, 
which men silently gazed on with wonder and 
tears ! 

0- We are anxious not to exaggerate ; for it is 15 
exposition rather than admiration that our readers 
require of us here ; and yet to avoid some ten- 
dency to that side is no easy matter. We love 
Burns, and we pity him ; and love and pity are 
prone to magnify. Criticism, it is sometimes 20 
thought, should be a cold business ; we are not so 
sure of this ; but, at all events, our concern with 
Burns is not exclusively that of critics. True and 
genial as his poetry must appear, it is not chiefly 



12 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

as a poet, but as a man, that he interests and 
affects us. He was often advised to write a trag- 
edy: time and means were not lent him for this; 
but through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of 

5 the deepest. We question whether the world has 
since witnessed so utterly sad a scene ; whether 
Napoleon himself, left to brawl with Sir Hudson 
Lowe, and perish on his rock ' amid the melan- 
choly main,' presented to the reflecting mind such 

10 a ' spectacle of pity and fear ' as did this intrinsi- 
cally nobler, gentler and perhaps greater soul, 
wasting itself away in a hopeless struggle with 
base entanglements, which coiled closer and closer 
round him, till only death opened him an outlet. 

15 Conquerors are a class of men with whom, for 
most part, the world could well dispense ; nor can 
the hard intellect, the unsympathizing loftiness 
and high but selfish enthusiasm of such persons 
inspire us in general with any affection ; at best it 

20 may excite amazement ; and their fall, like that of 
a pyramid, will be beheld with a certain sadness 
and awe. But a true Poet, a man in whose heart 
resides some effluence of Wisdom, some tone of 
the ' Eternal Melodies,' is the most precious gift 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 13 

• 
that can be bestowed on a generation : we see in 
him a freer, purer development of whatever is 
noblest in ourselves ; his life is a rich lesson to 
us ; and we mourn his death as that of a benefac- 
tor who loved and taught us. 5 
^ Such a gift had Nature, in her 'bounty, bestowed 
on us in Robert Burns; but with queenlike indiffer- 
ence she cast it from her hand, like a thing of no 
moment ; and it was defaced and torn asunder, as an 
idle bauble, before we recognized it. To the ill- 10 
starred Burns was given the power of making man's v 
life more venerable, but that of wisely guiding his 
own life was not given. Destiny, — for so in our 
ignorance we must speak, — his faults, the faults of 
others, proved too hard for him ; and that spirit, 15 
which might have soared could it but have walked, 
soon sank to the dust, its glorious faculties trodden 
under foot in the blossom ; and died, we may almost 
say, without ever having lived. And so kind and 
warm a soul ; so full of inborn riches, of love to all 20 
living and lifeless things ! How his heart flows out 
in sympathy over universal Nature ; and in her 
bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and a mean- 
ing ! The ' Daisy ' falls not unheeded under his 



14 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

ploughshare ; nor the ruined nest of that ' wee, 
cowering, timorous beastie,' cast forth, after all its 
provident pains, to ' thole the sleety dribble and 
cranreuch cauld.' The 'hoar visage' of Winter 

5 delights him ; he d^vells with a sad and oft-return- 
ing fondness on these scenes of solemn desolation ; 
but the voice of the tempest becomes an anthem 
to his ears ; he loves to walk in the sounding 
woods, for ' it raises his thoughts to Him that 

10 walketh on the wings of the wind,'' A true Poet- 
soul, for it needs but to be struck, and the sound 
. it yields will be music ! But observe him chiefly 
as he mingles with his brother men. What warm, 
all'Comprehending f ellow-f eeUng ; what trustful, 

15 boundless love ; what generous exaggeration of 
the object loved ! His rustic friend, his nutrbrown 
maiden, are no longer mean and homely, but a hero 
and a queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of 
Earth. The rough scenes of Scottish life, not 

20 seen by him in any Arcadian illusion, but in the 
rude contradiction, in the smoke and soil of a too 
harsh reality, are still lovely to him : Poverty is 
indeed his companion, but Love also, and Cour- 
age ; the simple feelings, the worth, the nobleness, 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 15 

that dwell under the straw roof, are dear and ven- 
erable to his heart : and thus over the lowest 
provinces of man's existence he pours the glory of 
his own soul ; and they rise, in shadow and sun- 
shine, softened and brightened into a beauty which 5 
other eyes discern not in the highest. He has a 
just self-consciousness, which too often degener- 
ates into pride ; yet it is a noble pride, for de- 
fence, not for offence ; no cold suspicious feeling, 
but a frank and social one. The Peasant Poet 10 
bears himself, w^e might say, like a King in exile: 
he is cast among the low, and feels himself equal 
to the highest ; yet he claims no rank, that none * 
may be disputed to him. The forward he can 
repel, the supercilious he can subdue ; pretensions 15 
of wealth or ancestry are of no avail with him; 
there is a fire in that dark eye, under which the 
'insolence of condescension' cannot thrive. In 
his abasement, in his extreme need, he forgets not 
for a moment the majesty of Poetry and Manhood. 20 
And yet, far as he feels himself above common 
men, he wanders not apart from them, but mixes 
warmly in their interests ; nay, throws himself into 
their arms, and, as it were, entreats them to love 



16 THOMAS CAELYLE. 

him. It is moving to see how, in his darkest 
despondency, this proud being still seeks relief 
from friendship; unbosoms himself, often to the 
unworthy ; and, amid tears, strains to his glowing 

5 heart a heart that knows only the name of friend- 
ship. And yet he was 'quick to learn'; a man 
of keen vii^ion, before whom common disguises 
afforded no concealment. His understanding saw 
through the hollowness even of accomplished de- 

10 ceivers; but there was a generous credulity in his 
heart. And so did our Peasant show himself 
among us ; ' a soul like an ^olian harp, in whose 
strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through them, 
changed itself into articulate melody.' And this 

15 was he for whom the world found no fitter busi- 
ness than quarrelling with smugglers and vintners, 
computing excise-dues upon tallow, and gauging 
ale-barrels ! In such toils was that mighty Spirit 
sorrowfully wasted : and a hundred years may 

20 pass on before another such is given us to waste. 

All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has 
left, seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than 
a poor mutilated fraction of what was in him ; 



USSAY OK BUENS. 17 

brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never 
show itself complete ; that wanted all things for 
completeness : culture, leisure, true effort, nay, 
even length of life. His poems are, with scarcely 
any exception, mere occasional effusions ; poured 6 
forth with little premeditation ; expressing, by such 
means as offered, the passion, opinion, or humor 
of the hour. Never in one instance was it permit- 
ted him to grapple with any subject with the full 
collection of his strength, to fuse and mould it in lo 
the concentrated fire of his genius. To try by the 
strict rules of Art such imperfect fragments, would 
be at once unprofitable and unfair. Nevertheless, 
there is something in these poems, marred and 
defective as they are, which forbids the most fas- 15 
tidious student of poetry to pass them by. Some 
sort of enduring quality they must have : for after 
fifty years of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic 
taste, they still continue to be read ; nay, are read 
more and more eagerly, more and more exten- 20 
sively; and this not only by literary virtuosos, 
and that class upon whom transitory causes operate 
most strongly, but by all classes, down to the most 
hard, unlettered and truly natural class, who read 



18 THOMAS CAELYLE. 

little, and especially no poetry, except because 
they find pleasure in it. The grounds of so sin- 
gular and wide a popularity, which extends, in 
a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and 

5 over all regions where the English tongue is 
spoken, are well worth inquiring into. After 
every just deduction, it seems to imply some rare 
excellence in these works. What is that excel- 
lence ? 

10 / To answer this question will not lead us far. 
The excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the 
rarest, whether in poetry or prose ; but, at the same 
time, it is plain and easily recognized : his Sin- 
cerity, his indisputable air of Truth. Here are 

15 no fabulous woes or joys ; no hollow fantastic sen- 
timentalities ; no wiredrawn refinings, either in 
thought or feeling : the passion that is traced be- 
fore us has glowed in a living heart ; the opinion 
he utters has risen in his OAvn understanding, and 

20 been a light to his own steps. He does not write 
from hearsay, but from sight and experience ; it 
is the scenes that he has lived and labored amidst, 
that he describes : those scenes, rude and humble 
as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions in 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 19 

his soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves ; 
and he speaks forth what is in him, not from any 
outward call of vanity or interest, but because his 
heart is too full to be silent. He speaks it with 
such melody and modulation as he can ; ' in homely 5 
rustic jingle ' ; but it is his own, and genuine. 
This is the grand secret for finding readers and 
retaining them : let him who would move and con- 
vince others, be first moved and convinced himself. 
Horace's rule. Si vis me flere^ is applicable in a 10 
wider sense than the literal one. To every poet, 
to every writer, we might say : Be true, if you 
would be believed. Let a man but speak forth 
with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, 
the actual condition of his own heart ; and other 15 
men, so strangely are we all knit together by the 
tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him. 
In culture, in extent of view, we may stand above 
the speaker, or below him ; but in either case, his 
words, if they are earnest and sincere, will find 20 
some response within us ; for in spite of all casual 
varieties in outward rank or inward, as face 
answers to face,* so does the heart of man to man. 
This may appear a very simple principle, and 



20 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

one which Burns had little merit in discovering. 
True, the discovery is easy enough : but the prac- 
tical appliance is not easy; is indeed the funda- 
mental difficulty which all poets have to strive 

5 with, and which scarcely one in the hundred ever 
fairly surmounts. A head too dull to discriminate 
the true from the false ; a heart too dull to love 
the one at all risks, and to hate the other in spite 
of all temptations, are alike fatal to a writer. 

10 With either, or as more commonly happens, with 
both of these deficiencies combine a love of dis- 
tinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom 
wanting, and we have Affectation, the bane of 
literature, as Cant, its elder brother, is of morals. 

15 How often does the one and the other front us, in 
poetry, as in life ! Great poets themselves are not 
always free of this vice ; nay, it is precisely on a 
certain sort and degree of greatness that it is most 
commonly ingrafted. A strong effort after excel- 

20 lence will sometimes solace itself with a mere 
shadow of success ; he who has much to unfold, 
will sometimes unfold it imperfectly. Byron, for 
instance, was no common man : yet if we examine 
his poetry with this view, we shall find it far 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 21 

enough from faultless. Generally speaking, we 
should say that it is not true. He refreshes us, 
not with the divine fountain, but too often with 
vulgar strong waters, stimulating indeed to the 
taste, but soon ending in dislike, or even nausea. 5 
Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask, 
real men ; we mean, poetically consistent and con- 
ceivable men ? Do not these characters, does not 
the character of their author, which more or less 
shines through them all, rather appear a thing put lo 
on for the occasion ; no natural or possible mode 
of being, but something intended to look much 
grander than nature ? Surely, all these stormful 
agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman con- 
tempt and moody desperation, with so much 15 
scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphur- 
ous humor, is more hke the brawling of a player 
in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three 
hours, than the bearing of a man in the business 
of life, which is to last threescore and ten years. 20 
To our minds there is a taint of this sort, some- 
thing which we should call theatrical, false, affected, 
in every one of these otherwise so powerful pieces. 
Perhaps Don Juan^ especially the latter parts of it, 



22 THOMAS CARLYLE, 

is the only thing approaching to a sincere work, 
he ever wrote ; the only work where he showed 
himself, in any measure, as he was ; and seemed 
so intent on his subject as, for moments, to for- 

5 get himself. Yet Byron hated this vice ; we be- 
lieve, heartily detested it : nay, he had declared 
formal war against it in words. So difficult is it 
even for the strongest to make this primary attain- 
ment, which might seem the simplest of all: to 

10 read its own eonseiousness witJwut mistakes^ without 
errors involuntary or Avilful ! We recollect no 
poet of Burns's susceptibility who comes before 
us from the first, and abides Avith us to the last, 
with such a total want of affectation. He is an 

15 honest man, and an honest writer. In his suc- 
cesses and his failures, in his greatness and his 
littleness, he is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters 
with no lustre but his own. We reckon this to 
be a great virtue ; to be, in fact, the root of most 

20 other virtues, literary as well as moral. 

N ^ Here, however, let us say, it is to the Poetry of 
Burns that we now allude ; to those writings which 
he had time to meditate, and where no special 
reason existed to warp his critical feeling, or ob- 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 23 

struct his endeavor to fulfil it. Certain of his 
Letters, and other fractions of prose composition, 
by no means deserve this praise. Here, doubt- 
less, there is not the same natural truth of style ; 
but on the contrary, something not only stiff, but 5 
strained and twisted ; a certain high-flown inflated 
tone ; the stilting emphasis of which contrasts ill 
with the firmness and rugged simplicity of even 
his poorest verses. Thus no man, it would ap- 
pear, is altogether unaffected. Does not Shak- lo 
speare himself sometimes premeditate the sheerest 
bombast ! But even with regard to these Letters 
of Burns, it is but fair to state that he had two 
excuses. The first was his comparative deficiency 
in language. Burns, though for most part he writes 15 
with singular force and even gracefulness, is not 
master of English prose, as he is of Scotch verse ; 
not master of it, we mean, in proportion to the 
depth and vehemence of his matter. These Let- 
ters strike us as the effort of a man to express 20 
something which he has no organ fit for express- 
ing. But a second and weightier excuse is to be 
found in the peculiarity of Burns's social rank. 
His correspondents are often men whose relation 



24 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

to him he has never accurately ascertained ; whom 
therefore he is either forearming himself against ; 
or else unconsciously flattering, by adopting the 
style he thinks will please them. At all events, 

5 we should remember that these faults, even in his 
Letters, are not the rule, but the exception. 
Whenever he writes, as one would ever wish to 
do, to trusted friends and on real interests, his 
style becomes simple, vigorous, expressive, some- 

10 times even beautiful. His letters to Mrs. Dunlop 
are uniformly excellent. 

^ \J| But we return to his Poetry. In addition to 
its Sincerity, it has another peculiar merit, which 
indeed is but a mode, or perhaps a means, of the 

15 foregoing: this displays itself in his choice of sub- 
jects ; or rather in his indifference as to subjects, 
and the power he has of making all subjects inter- 
esting. The ordinary poet, like the ordinary man, 
is forever seeking in external circumstances the 

20 help which can be found only in himself. In what 
is familiar and near at hand, he discerns no form 
or comeliness : home is not poetical but prosaic ; 
it is in some past, distant, conventional heroic 
world, that poetry resides \ were he there and not 



ESSAY ON BUBNS, ' 25 

here, were he thus and not so, it would be well 
with him. Hence our innumerable host of rose- 
colored Novels and iron-mailed Epics, with their 
locality not on the Earth, but somewhere nearer 
to the Moon. Hence our Virgins of the Sun, and 5 
our Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in 
turbans, and copper-colored Chiefs in wampum, 
and so many other truculent figures from the 
heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all 
hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be with them ! 10 
But yet, as a great moralist proposed preaching to 
the men of this century, so would we fain preach 
to the- poets, ^a sermon on the duty of staying at 
home.' Let them be sure that heroic ages and 
heroic climates can' do little for them. That form 15 
of life has attraction for us, less because it is bet- 
ter or nobler than our own, than simply because 
it is different ; and even this attraction must be 
of the most transient sort. For will not our own 
age, one day, be an ancient one ; and have as 20 
quaint a costume as the rest ; not contrasted with 
the rest, therefore, but ranked along with them, 
in respect of quaintness? Does Homer interest 
us now, because he wrote of what passed beyond 



26 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

his native Greece, and two centuries before he 
was born; or because he wrote what passed in 
God's world, and in the heart of man, which is the 
same after thirty centuries ? Let our poets look 

5 to this : is their feeling really finer, truer, and their 
vision deeper than that of other men, — they have 
nothing to fear, even from the humblest subject ; 
is it not so, — they have nothing to hope, but an 
ephemeral favor, even from the highest. 

10 . r The poet, we imagine, can never have far to 
seek for a subject : the elements of his art are in 
him, and around him on every hand; for him 
the Ideal world is not remot^e from the Actual, 
but under it and within it : nay, he is a poet, pre- 

15 cisely because he can discern it there. Wherever 
there is a sky above him, and a world around him, 
the poet is in his place ; for here too is man's exist- 
ence, with its infinite longings and small acquir- 
ings ; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed endeavors ; 

20 its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes 
that wander through Eternity; and all the mys- 
tery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever 
made of, in any age or climate, since man first began 
to live. Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy in 



ESSAY ON BURJSrS, 27 

every death-bed, though it were a peasant's, and a 
bed of heath? And are wooings and weddings 
obsolete, that there can be Comedy no longer? 
Or are men suddenly grown wise, that Laughter 
must no longer shake his sides, but be cheated of 5 
his Farce? Man's life and nature is, as it was, 
and as it will ever be. But the poet must have 
an eye to read these things, and a heart to under- 
stand them ; or they come and pass away before 
him in vain. He is a vates, a seer ; a gift of vision lo 
has been given him. Has life no meanings for 
him, which another cannot equally decipher ; then 
he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not make him 
one. 

, In this respect. Burns, though not perhaps ab- 15 
solutely a great poet, better manifests his capa- 
bility, better proves the truth of his genius, than 
if he had by his own strength kept the whole 
Minerva Press going,* to the end of his literary 
course. He shows himself at least a poet of Na- 20 
ture's own making ; and Nature, after all, is still 
the grand agent in making poets. We often hear 
of this and the other external condition being 
requisite for the existence of a poet. Sometimes 



28 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

it is a certain sort of training ; he must have 
studied certain things, studied for instance ' the 
elder dramatists,' and so learned a poetic language ; 
as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. 

5 At other times we are told he must be bred in a 
certain rank, and must be on a confidential footing 
with the higher classes ; because, above all things, 
he must see the world. As to seeing the world, 
we apprehend this will cause him little difficulty, 

10 if he have but eyesight to see it with. Without 
eyesight, indeed, the task might be hard. The 
blind or the purblind man ' travels from Dan to 
Beersheba, and finds it all barren.' But happily 
every poet is born in the world ; and sees it, with 

15 or against his will, every day and every hour he 
lives. The mysterious workmanship of man's 
heart, the true light and the inscrutable darkness 
of man's destiny, reveal themselves not only in 
capital cities and crowded saloons, but in every 

20 hut and hamlet where men have their abode. Nay, 
do not the elements of all human virtues and all 
human vices ; the passions at once of a Borgia and 
of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or fainter 
lines, in the consciousness of every individual 



ESSAY ON BURKS. 29 

bosom, that has practised honest self-examina- 
tion? Truly, this same world may be seen in 
Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look well, as clearly 
as it ever came to light in Crockford's, or the 
Tuileries itself. 5 

But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid 
on the poor aspirant to poetry; for it is hinted 
that he should have been born two centuries ago ; 
inasmuch as poetry, about that date, vanished from 
the earth, and became no longer attainable by men ! lo 
Such cobweb speculations have, now and then, 
overhung the field of literature ; but they obstruct 
not the growth of any plant there : the Shakspeare 
or the Burns, unconsciously and merely as he walks 
onward, silently brushes them away. Is not every 15 
genius an impossibility till he appear? Why do 
we call him new and original, if we saw where his 
marble was lying, and what fabric he could rear 
from it? It is not the material but the workman 
that is w^anting. It is not the dark place that hin- 20 
ders, but the dim eye, A Scottish peasant's life 
was the meanest and rudest of all lives, till Burns 
became a poet in it, and a poet of it; found it 
a man^s life, and therefore significant to men. A 



30 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

thousand battle-fields remain unsung ; but the 
Wounded Hare has not perished Avithout its me- 
morial ; a balm of mercy yet breathes on us from 
its dumb agonies, because a poet was there. Our 

5 Halloween had passed and repassed, in rude awe 
and laughter, since the era of the Druids ; but no 
Theocritus, till Burns, discerned in it the materials 
of a Scottish Idyl : neither was the Holy Fair any 
Council of Trent or Roman Jubilee ; but neverthe- 

10 less. Superstition and Hypocrisy and Fun having 
been propitious to him, in this man's hand it 
became a poem, instinct with satire and genuine 
comic life. Let but the true poet be given us, we 
repeat it, place him where and how you will, and 

15 true poetry will not be wanting. 

1 Independently of the essential gift of poetic 

feeling, as we have now attempted to describe it, 

a certain rugged sterling worth pervades whatever 

Burns has written ; a virtue, as of green fields and 

20 mountain breezes, dwells in his poetry ; it is redo- 
lent of natural life and hardy natural men. There 
is a decisive strength in him, and yet a sweet 
native gracefulness : he is tender, he is vehement, 
yet without constraint or too visible effort; he melts 



ESSAY ON BUBlSrS. 31 

the heart, or inflames it, with a power which seems 
habitual and familiar to him. We see that in this 
man there was the gentleness, the trembling pity 
of a woman, with the deep earnestness, the force 
and passionate ardor of a hero. Tears lie in him, 5 
and consuming fire ; as lightning lurks in the drops 
of the summer cloud. He has a resonance in his 
bosom for every note of human feeling ; the high 
and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, ,. the joyful, are 
welcome in their turns to his ' lightly-moved and lo 
all-conceiving spirit.' And observe with what a 
fierce prompt force he grasps his subject, be it 
what it may ! How he fixes, as it were, the full 
image of the matter in his eye ; full and clear in 
every lineament; and catches the real type and 15 
essence of it, amid a thousand accidents and super- 
ficial circumstances, no one of which misleads him ! 
Is it of reason, some truth to be discovered ? No 
sophistry, no vain surface-logic detains him ; quick, 
resolute, unerring, he pierces through into the mar- 20 
row of the question; and speaks his verdict with 
an emphasis that cannot be forgotten. Is it of 
description ; some visual object to be represented ? 
No poet of any age or nation is more graphic than 



32 THOMAS CAULYLE, 



> 



Burns : the characteristic features disclose them- 
selves to him at a glance ; three lines from his 
hand and we have a likeness. And, in that rough 
dialect, in that rude, often awkward metre, so 

5 clear and definite a likeness ! It seems a draughts- 
man working with a burnt stick ; and yet the burin 
of a Retzsch is not more expressive or exact. 

\ ^\ Of this last excellence, the plainest and most 
comprehensive of all, being indeed the root and 

10 foundation of every sort of talent, poetical or intel- 
lectual, we could produce innumerable instances 
from the writings of Burns. Take these glimpses 
of a snow-storm from his Winte?* Night (the italics 
are ours) : 

15 When biting Boreas, fell and doure, 

Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r, 
And Phoebus gies a shortlived glowr 

Far south the lift, 
Dim-dark'' ning thro^ the flaky showW 

20 Or whirling drift : 

Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd, 
Poor labor sweet in sleep was lock'd, 
While burns ivV snawy wreeths upchok^d 

Wild-eddying sivirl, 
25 Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd 

Down headlong hurl. 



ESSAY ON BUENS. 33 

Are there not ' descriptive touches ^ here ? The 
describer saw this thing ; the essential feature and 
true likeness of every circumstance in it ; saw, and 
not with the eye only. ' Poor labor locked in 
sweet sleep ' ; the dead stillness of man, uncon- 5 
scious, vanquished, yet not unprotected, while 
such strife of the material elements rages, and 
seems to reign supreme in loneliness : this is of 
the heart as well as of the eye ! -^— Look also at 
his image of a thaw, and prophesied fall of the lo 
Auld Brig : 

When heavy, dark, continued, a' -day rains 

Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains ; 

When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, 

Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains boil, 15 

Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course, 

Or haunted Garpal i draws his feeble source, 

Arous'd by blust'ring winds and spotting thowes,* 

In mony a torrent down his snaw-broo rowes ; 

While crashing ice, borne on the roaring spent, 20 

Sweeps dams and mills and brigs a' to the gate ; 

And from Glenbuck down to the Rottonkey, 

Auld Ayr is just one lengthened tumbling sea ; 

Then down ye'll hurl, Deil nor ye never rise ! 

And dash the gumlie jaups up to the pouring skies. ' 25 

^ Fahulosus Hydaspes ! 



34 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that 
Deluge ! The welkin has, as it were, bent down 
with its weight ; the ' gumlie jaups ' and the ' pour- 
ing skies ' are mingled together ; it is a world of 

6 rain and ruin. — In respect of mere clearness and 
minute fidelity, the Farmer's commendation of his 
Auld Mare^ in plough or in cart, may vie with 
Homer's Smithy of the Cyclops, or yoking of 
Priam's Chariot. Nor have we forgotten stout 

10 Burn-the-wind and his brawny customers, inspired 
by Scotch Brink: but it is needless to multiply 
examples. One other trait of a much finer sort 
we select from multitudes of such among his 
Songs, It gives, in a single line, to the saddest 

15 feeling the saddest environment and local habita- 
tion: 

The pale Moon is setting beyond the white wave, 

And Time is setting wV me, O ; 

Farewell, false friends ! false lover, farewell ! 

20 I'll nae mair trouble them nor thee, 0. 

^ n This clearness of sight we have called the foun- 
dation of all talent ; for in fact, unless we see our 
object, how shall we know how to place or prize 
it, in our understanding, our imagination, our 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 35 

affections ? Yet it is not in itself, perhaps, a very 
high excellence ; but capable of being united in- 
differently with the strongest, or with ordinary 
power. Homer surpasses all men in this quality : 
but strangely enough, at no great distance below 6 
him are Richardson and Defoe. It belongs, in 
truth, to what is called a lively mind ; and gives 
no sure indication of the higher endowments that 
may exist along with it. In all "the three cases 
we have mentioned, it is combined with great gar- 10 
rulity ; their descriptions are detailed, ample and 
lovingly exact ; Homer's fire bursts through, from 
time to time, as if by accident; but Defoe and 
Richardson have no fire. Burns, again, is not 
more distinguished by the clearness than by the 15 
impetuous force of his conceptions. Of the 
strength, the piercing emphasis with which he 
thought, his emphasis of expression may give a 
humble but the readiest proof. Who ever uttered 
sharper sayings than his ; words more memorable, 20 
now by their burning vehemence, now by their 
cool vigor and laconic pith? A single phrase 
depicts a whole subject, a whole scene. We hear 
of ' a gentleman that derived his patent of nobility 



86 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

direct from Almighty God.' Our Scottish fore- 
fathers in the battle-field struggled forward ' red- 
wat-shod ' : in this one word, a full vision of horror 
and carnage, perhaps too frightfully accurate for 

5 Art! 

^ , In fact, one of the leading features in the mind 
of Burns is this vigor of his strictly intellectual 
perceptions. A resolute force is ever visible in 
his judgments, and in his feelings and volitions. 

10 Professor Stewart says of him, with some sur- 
prise : ' All the faculties of Burns's mind were, as 
far as I could judge, equally vigorous ; and his 
predilection for poetry was rather the result of 
his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than 

15 of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of 
composition. From his conversation I should have 
pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever 
walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abili- 
ties.' But this, if we mistake not, is at all times 

20 the very essence of a truly poetical endowment. 
Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, 
where the whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin 
sensibility, and a certain vague random tuneful- 
ness of nature, is no separate faculty, no organ 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 37 

which can be superadded to the rest, or disjoined 
from them ; but rather the result of their general 
harmony and completion. The feelings, the gifts 
that exist in the Poet are those that exist, Avith 
more or less development, in every human soul : 5 
the imagination, which shudders at the Hell of 
Dante, is the same faculty, weaker in degree, 
which called that picture into being. How does 
the Poet speak to men, with power, but by being 
still more a man than they ? Shakspeare, it has lO 
been well observed, in the planning and complet- 
ing of his tragedies, has shown an Understanding, 
were it nothing more, which might have governed 
states, or indited a Novum Organum, What 
Burns's force of understanding may have been, 15 
we have less means of judging : it had to dwell 
among the humblest objects ; never saw Philoso- 
phy ; never rose, except by natural effort and for 
short intervals, into the region of great ideas. 
Nevertheless, sufficient indication, if no proof suf- 20 
ficient, remains for us in his works : we discern 
the brawny movements of a gigantic though un- 
tutored strength ; and can understand how, in 
conversation, his quick sure insight into men and 



38 THOMAS CARLTLE. 

things may, as much as aught else about him, 
have amazed the best thinkers of his time and 
country. 

V i But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of 

5 Burns is fine as well as strong. The more deli- 
cate relations of things could not well have es- 
caped his eye, for they were intimately present to 
his heart. The logic of tlie senate and the forum 
is indispensable, but not all-sufficient; nay, per- 

10 haps the highest Truth is that which will the most 
certainly elude it. For this logic works by words, 
and ' the highest,' it has been said, ' cannot be 
expressed in words.' We are not without tokens 
of an openness for this higher truth also, of a keen 

15 though uncultivated sense for it, having existed in 
Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be remembered, 
' wonders,' in tlie passage above quoted, that 
Burns had formed some distinct conception of the 
' doctrine of association.' We rather think that 

20 far subtler things than the doctrine of association 

had from of old been familiar to him. Here for 

instance : 

c^ 9 ' We know nothing,' thus writes he, ' or next to 

nothing, of the structure of our souls, so we can- 



ESSAY ON BURNS, 39 

not account for those seeming caprices in them, 
that one should be particularly pleased with this 
thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a 
different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. 
I have some favorite flowers in spring, among 5 
which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the 
foxglove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, 
and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang 
over with particular delight. I never hear the 
loud sohtary whistle of the curlew in a summer 10 
noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of 
gray plover in an autumnal morning, without feel- 
ing an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of 
devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to 
what can this be owing? Are we a piece of 15 
machinery, which, like the JEolian harp, passive, 
takes the impression of the passing accident ; or 
do these workings argue something within us 
above the trodden clod ? I own myself partial to 
such proofs of those awful and important reali- 20 
ties : a God that made all things, man's immate- 
rial and immortal nature, and a world of weal or 
woe beyond death and the grave.' 
^ L^ Force and fineness of understanding are often 



40 THOMAS CARLYLE, 

spoken of as something different from general 
force and fineness of nature, as something partly 
independent of them. The necessities of lan- 
guage so require it; but in truth these qualities 

5 are not distinct and independent : except in spe- 
cial cases, and from special causes, they ever go 
together. A man of strong understanding is gen- 
erally a man of strong character ; neither is deli- 
cacy in the one kind often divided from delicacy 

10 in the other. No one, at all events, is ignorant 
that in the Poetry of Burns keenness of insight 
keeps pace with keenness of feeling ; that his light 
is not more pervading than his warmth. He is a 
man of the most impassioned temper ; with pas- 

15 sions not strong only, but noble, and of the sort in 
which great virtues and great poems take their 
rise. It is reverence, it is love towards all Nature 
that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its beauty, 
and makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. 

20 Tliere is a true old saying, that ' Love furthers 
knowledge ' : but above all, it is the living essence 
of that knoAvledge which makes poets; the first 
principle of its existence, increase, activity. Of 
Burns's fervid affection, his generous all-embra- 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 41 

f cing Love, we have spoken already, as of the grand 
1 distinction of his nature, seen equally in word and 
' deed, in his Life and in his Writings. It were 
easy to multiply examples. Not man only, but all 
that environs man in the material and moral uni- 5 
verse, is lovely in his sight : ' the hoary hawthorn,' 
the ' troop of gray plover,' the ' solitary curlew,' 
all are dear to him ; all live in this Earth along 
with him, and to all he is knit as in mysterious 
brotherhood. How touching is it, for instance, lo 
that, amidst the gloom of personal misery, brood- 
ing over the wintry desolation without him and 
within him, he thinks of the ' ourie cattle ' and 
' silly sheep,' and their sufferings in the pitiless 
storm! 15 

I thought me on the ourie cattle, 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle, 

O' wintry war, 
Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, 

Beneath a scaur. 20 

Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing. 
That in the merry months o' spring 
Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o' thee ? 
Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, 25 

And close thy ee ? 



5(f 



42 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

The tenant of the mean hut, with its ' ragged roof 
and chinky wall,' has a heart to pity even these ! 
This is worth several homilies on Mercy ; for it is 
the voice of Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives 
5 in sympathy ; his soul rushes forth into all realms 
of being; nothing that has existence can be in- 
different to him. The very Devil he cannot hate 
with right orthodoxy : 

But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben ; 

10 O, wad ye tak' a thought and men' ! 

Ye aiblins might, — I dinna ken, — 

Still hae a stake ; 
I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 

Even for your sake ! 

15 "5"^ is the father of curses and lies," said Dr. 
Slop; " and is cursed and damned already." — " I 
am sorry for it," quoth my uncle Toby ! — a Poet 
without Love were a physical and metaphysical 
impossibility. 

But has it not been said, in contradiction to 
this principle, that ' Indignation makes verses ' ? 
It has been so said, and is true enough : but the 
contradiction is apparent, not real. The Indigna- 
tion which makes verses is, properly speaking, an 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 43 

inverted Love ; the love of some right, some 
worth, some goodness, belonging to ourselves or 
others, which has been injured, and which this 
tempestuous feeling issues forth to defend and 
avenge. No selfish fury of heart, existing there 5 
as a primary feeling, and without its opposite, ever 
produced much Poetry: otherwise, we suppose, 
the Tiger were the most musical of all our choris- 
ters. Johnson said, he loved a good hater; by 
which he must have meant, not so much one that 10 
hated violently, as one that hated wisely; hated 
baseness from love of nobleness. However, in 
spite of Johnson's paradox, tolerable enough for 
once in speech, but which need not have been so 
often adopted in print since then, we rather believe 15 
that good men deal sparingly in hatred, either wise 
or unwise : nay, that a ' good ' hater is still a desi- 
deratum in this world. The Devil, at least, who 
passes for the chief and best of that class, is said 
to be nowise an amiable character. 20 

Of the verses which Indignation makes. Burns 
has also given us specimens : and among the best 
that were ever given. Who will forget his 
' Dweller in yon Dungeon dark ' ; a piece that * 



44 THOMAS CARLYLE, 

might have been chanted by the Furies of -^schy- 
lus? The secrets of tlie infernal Pit are laid 
bare ; a boundless baleful ' darkness visible ' ; and 
streaks of hell-fire quivering madly in its black 
5 haggard bosom ! 

Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, 
Hangman of Creation, mark ! 
Who in widow's weeds appears, 
Laden with unhonoured years, 
10 Noosing with care a bursting purse 

Baited with many a deadly curse ! 

X Why should we speak of Scots wha hae wi ' Wal- 
lace hied ; since all know of it, from the king to 
the meanest of his subjects ? This dithyrambic 

15 was composed on horseback ; in riding in the mid- 
dle of tempests, over the wildest Galloway moor, 
in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the 
poet's looks, forbore to speak, — judiciously enough, 
for a man composing Bruce^s Address might be 

20 unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn 
was singing itself, as he formed it, through the 
soul of Burns ; but to the external ear, it should 
be sung with the throat of the whirlwind. So long 
as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman 



ESSAY ON BURNS. > 45 

or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this 
war-ode; the best, we believe, that was ever 
written by any pen. 
2 ^ Another wild stormful Song, that dwells in our 
ear and mind with a strange tenacity, is Macpher- 6 
son's Farewell, Perhaps there is something in 
the tradition itself that cooperates. For was not 
this grim Celt, this shaggy Northland Cacus that 
' lived a life of sturt and strife, and died by treach- 
erie,' — was not he too one of the Nimrods and 10 
Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his own 
remote misty glens, for want of a clearer and 
wider one ? Nay, was there not a touch of grace 
given him ? A fibre of love and softness, of poetry 
itself, must have lived in his savage heart : for he 15 
composed that air the night before his execution ; 
on the wings of that poor melody his better soul 
would soar away above oblivion, pain and all the 
ignominy and despair, which, like an avalanche, 
was hurling him to the abyss ! Here also, as at 20 
Thebes, and in Pelops' line, was material Fate 
matched against man's Free-will ; matched in bit- 
terest though obscure duel ; and the ethereal soul 
sank not, even in its blindness, without a cry 



46 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

which has survived it. But who, except Burns, 
could have given words to such a soul ; words that 
we never listen to without a strange half -barbarous, 
half -poetic fellow-feeling ? 

5 Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 

Sae dauntingly gaed he ; 
He play'd a spring, and danced it round, 
Below the gallows-tree. 

"^ ' Under a lighter disguise, the same principle of 

10 Love, which we have recognized as the great char- 
acteristic of Burns, and of all true poets, occa- 
sionally manifests itself in the shape of Humor. 
Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny moods, a full 
buoyant flood of mirth rolls through the mind of 

15 Burns ; he rises to the high, and stoops to the low, 
and is brother and playmate to all Nature. We 
speak not of his bold and often irresistible faculty 
of caricature ; for this is Drollery rather than Hu- 
mor : but a much tenderer sportf ulness dwells in 

20 him ; and comes forth here and there, in evanes- 
cent and beautiful touches ; as in his Address to 
the Mouse ^ or the Farmer's Mare^ or in his Elegy 
on poor Mailie^ which last may be reckoned his 
happiest effort of this kind. In these pieces there 



ESSAY 0]^ BURNS. 47 

are traits of a Humor as fine as that of Sterne ; 
yet altogether different, original, peculiar, — the 
Humor of Burns. 

Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many 
other kindred qualities of Burns's Poetry, much 5 
more might be said ; but now, with these poor 
outlines of a sketch, we must prepare to quit this 
part of our subject. To speak of his individual 
Writings, adequately and with any detail, would 
lead us far beyond our limits. As already hinted, lo 
we can look on but few of these pieces as, in strict 
critical language, deserving the name of Poems : 
they are rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed 
sense ; yet seldom essentially melodious, aerial, 
poetical. Tarn o' Shanter itself, which enjoys so 15 
high a favor, does not appear to us at all decisively 
to come under this last category. It is not so 
much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric ; 
the heart and body of the story still lies hard and 
dead. He has not gone back, much less carried 20 
us back, into that dark, earnest, wondering age, 
when the tradition was believed, and when it took 
its rise; he does not attempt, by any new-model- 
ling of his supernatural ware, to strike anew that 



48 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

deep mysterious chord of human nature, which 
once responded to such things ; and which lives in 
us too, and will forever live, though silent now, or 
vibrating with far other notes, and to far different 

5 issues. Our German readers will understand us, 
when we say, that he is not the Tieck but the 
Mus'aus of this tale. Externall}' it is all green 
and living ; yet look closer, it is no firm growth, 
but only ivy on a rock. The piece does not prop- 

10 erly cohere : the strange chasm which yawns in 
our incredulous imaginations between the Ayr 
public-house and the gate of Tophet, is nowhere 
bridged over, nay, the idea of such a bridge is 
laughed at ; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure 

15 becomes a mere drunken phantasmagoria, or many- 
colored spectrum painted on ale-vapors, and the 
Farce alone has any reality. We do not say that 
Burns should have made much more of this tradi- 
tion ; we rather think that, for strictly poetical 

20 purposes, not much ivas to be made of it. Neither 
are we blind to the deep, varied, genial power dis- 
played in what he has actually accomplished ; but 
we find far more ' Shakspearean ' qualities, as these 
of Tarn o' Shanter have been fondly named, in many 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 49 

of his other pieces; nay, we incline to believe that 
this latter might have been written, all but quite 
as well, by a man who, in place of genius, had 
only possessed talent. 
Q ^ Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most 5 
strictly poetical of all his ' poems ' is one which 
does not appear in Currie's Edition ; but has been 
often printed before and since, under the humble 
title of The Jolly Beggars, The subject truly is 
among the lowest in Nature ; but it only the more 10 
shows our Poet's gift in raising it into the domain 
of Art. To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly 
compacted ; melted together, refined ; and poured 
forth in one flood of true liquid harmony. It is 
light, airy, soft of movement ; yet sharp and pre- 15 
cise in its details ; every face is a portrait : that 
raucle carlin^ that wee Apollo^ that Son of Mars^ are 
Scottish, yet ideal ; the scene is at once a dream, 
and the very Ragcastle of ' Poosie-Nansie.' Far- 
ther, it seems in a considerable degree complete, 20 
a real self-supporting Whole, which is the highest 
merit in a poem. The blanket of the Night is 
drawn asunder for a moment ; in full, ruddy, 
flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen 



50 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

in their boisterous revel ; for the strong pulse of 
Life vindicates its right to gladness even here ; and 
when the curtain closes, we prolong the action, 
without effort ; the next day as the last, our Caird 

5 and our Balladmonger are singing and soldiering ; 
their ' brats and callets ' are hawking, begging, 
cheating ; and some other night, in new combina- 
tions, they will wring from Fate another hour of 
wassail and good cheer. Apart from the universal 

10 sympathy with man which this again bespeaks in 
Burns, a genuine inspiration and no inconsiderable 
technical talent are manifested here. There is the 
fidelity, humor, warm life and accurate painting 
and grouping of some Teniers, for whom hostlers 

15 and carousing peasants are not without signifi- 
cance. It would be strange, doubtless, to call 
this the best of Burns's writings : we mean to say 
only, that it seems to us the most perfect of its 
kind, as a piece of poetical composition, strictly 

20 so called. In The Beggars^ Opera^ in The Beg- 
gars^ Bushy as other critics have already remarked, 
there is nothing which, in real poetic vigor, equals 
this Cantata ; nothing, as we think, which comes 
within many degrees of it. 



JESS AY ON BUBNS. 61 

O "Z But by far the most finished, complete and 
truly inspired pieces of Burns are, without dispute, 
to be found among his Songs, It is here that, al- 
though through a small aperture, his light shines 
with least obstruction ; in its highest beauty and 6 
pure sunny clearness. The reason may be, that 
Song is a brief simple species of composition; and 
requires nothing so much for its perfection as 
genuine poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. 
Yet the Song has its rules equally with the lo 
Tragedy; rules which in most cases are poorly 
fulfilled, in many cases are not so much as felt. 
We might write a long essay on the Songs of 
Burns; which we reckon by far the best that 
Britain has yet produced: for indeed, since the 15 
era of Queen Elizabeth, we know not that, by any 
other hand, aught truly worth attention has been 
accomplished in this department. True, we have 
songs enough ' by persons of quality ' ; we have 
tawdry, hollow, wine-bred madrigals ; many a 20 
rhymed speech ' in the flowing and watery vein of 
Osorius the Portugal Bishop,' rich in sonorous 
words, and, for moral, dashed perhaps with some 
tint of a sentimental sensuality; all which many 



62 THOMA/S CARLYLE. 

persons cease not from endeavoring to sing; though 
for most part, we fear, the music is but from the 
throat outwards, or at best from some region far 
enough short of the Soul ; not in which, but in a 

5 certain inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in some 
vaporous debatable-land on the outskirts of the 
Nervous System, most of such madrigals and 
rhymed speeches seem to have originated. 

Ij With the Songs of Burns we must not name 

10 these things. Independently of the clear, manly, 
heartfelt sentiment that ever pervades liis poetry, 
his Songs are honest in another point of view: in 
form, as well as in spirit. They do not affect to 
be set to music, but they actually and in them- 

15 selves are music ; they have received their life, 
and fashioned themselves together, in the medium 
of Harmony, as Venus rose from the bosom of the 
sea. The story, the feeling, is not detailed, but 
suggested ; not said^ or spouted, in rhetorical 

20 completeness and coherence ; but sung^ in fitful 
gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in 
warhlings not of the voice only, but of the whole 
mind. We consider this to be the essence of a 
song ; and that no songs since the little careless 



ESSAY ON BUEJSrS. 53 

catches, and as it were drops of song, which Shak- 
speare has here and there sprinkled over his Plays, 
fulfil this condition in nearly the same degree as 
most of Burns's do. Such grace and truth of ex- 
ternal movement, too, presupposes in general a 5 
corresponding force and truth of sentiment and 
inward meaning. The Songs of Burns are not 
more perfect in the former quality than in the 
latter. With what tenderness he sings, yet with 
what vehemence and entireness ! There is a pier- 10 
cing wail in his sorrow, the purest rapture in his 
joy; he burns with the sternest ire, or laughs 
with the loudest or sliest mirth ; and yet he is 
sweet and soft, ' sweet as the smile when fond 
lovers meet, and soft as their parting tear.' If we 15 
farther take into account the immense variety of 
his subjects ; how, from the loud flowing revel in 
Willie hrew'd a Peck o' Maiit^ to the still, rapt 
enthusiasm of sadness for Mary in Heaven ; from 
the glad kind greeting of Auld Langsyne^ or the 20 
comic archness of Duncan Grray^ to the fire-eyed 
fury of Scots wlia hae w€ Wallace bled, he has 
found a tone and words for every mood of man's 
heart, — it will seem a small praise if we rank him 



54 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

as the first of all our Song-writers ; for we know 
not where to find one worthy of being second to 
him. 
"^ ' . It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns's 

5 chief influence as an author will ultimately be 
found to depend : nor, if our Fletcher's aphorism 
is true, shall we account this a small influence. 
' Let me make the songs of a people,' said he, ' and 
you shall make its laws.' Surely, if ever any Poet 

10 might have equalled himself with Legislators on 
this ground, it was Burns. His Songs are already 
part of the mother-tongue, not of Scotland only, 
but of Britain, and of the millions that in all ends 
of the earth speak a British language. In hut 

15 and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in many-colored 
joy and woe of existence, the name^ the voice of 
that joy and that woe, is the name and voice which 
Burns has given them. Strictly speaking, perhaps 
no British man has so deeply affected the thoughts 

20 and feelings of so many men, as this solitary and 
altogether * private individual, with means appar- 
ently the humblest. 

^ I . In another point of view, moreover, we incline 
to think that Burns's influence may have been 



ESSAY OJSr BUBNS. 55 

considerable : we mean, as exerted specially on the 
Literature of his country, at least on the Litera- 
ture of Scotland. Among the great changes 
which British, particularly Scottish literature, has 
undergone since that period, one of the greatest 6 
will be found to consist in its remarkable increase 
of nationality. Even the English writers, most 
popular in Burns's time, were little distinguished 
for their literary patriotism, in this its best sense. 
A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in good lo 
measure, taken place of the old insular home-feel- 
ing; literature was, as it were, without any local 
environment ; was not nourished by the affections 
which spring from a native soil. Our Grays and 
Glovers seemed to write almost as if in vacuo ; 15 
the thing written bears no mark of place ; it is not 
written so much for Englishmen, as for men; or 
rather, which is the inevitable result of this, for 
certain Generalizations which philosophy termed 
men. Goldsmith is an exception : not so Johnson ; 20 
the scene of his Rambler is little more English than 
that of his Rasselas. 

But if such was, in some degree, the case with 
England, it was, in the highest degree, the case 



56 THOMAS CARLYLE, 

with Scotland. In fact, our Scottish literature had, 
at that period, a very singular aspect ; unexampled, 
so far as we know, except perhaps at Geneva, 
where the same state of matters appears still to 

5 continue. For a long period after Scotland be- 
came British, w^e had no literature : at the date 
when Addison and Steele were writing their 
Spectators^ our good Boston was writing, with the 
noblest intent, but alike in defiance of grammar 

10 and philosophy, his Fourfold State of Man, Then 
came the schisms in our National Church, and 
the fiercer schisms in our Body Politic : Theo- 
logic ink, and Jacobite blood, with gall enough in 
both cases, seemed to have blotted out the intel- 

15 lect of the country : however, it was only obscured, 
not obliterated. Lord Kames made nearly the 
first attempt at writing English ; and ere long, 
Hume, Robertson, Smith, and a whole host of fol- 
lowers, attracted hither the eyes of all Europe. 

20 And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of our 
'fervid genius,' there was nothing truly Scottish, 
nothing indigenous ; except, perhaps, the natural 
impetuosity of intellect, which we sometimes 
claim, and are sometimes upbraided with, as a 



ESSAY ON BUENS. 57 

characteristic of our nation. It is curious to 
remark that Scotland, so full of writers, had no 
Scottish culture, nor indeed any English ; our cul- 
ture was almost exclusively French. It was by 
studying Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boil- 5 
eau, that Kames had trained himself to be a critic 
and philosopher ; it was the light of Montesquieu 
and Mably that guided Robertson in his political 
speculations ; Quesnay's lamp that kindled the 
lamp of Adam Smith. Hume was too rich a man lo 
to borrow ; and perhaps he reacted on the French 
more than he was acted on by them : but neither 
had he aught to do with Scotland; Edinburgh, 
equally with La Fleche, was but the lodging and 
laboratory, in which he not so much morally livedo 15 
as metaphysically investigated. Never, perhaps, 
was there a class of writers so clear and well- 
ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all appearance, 
of any patriotic affection, nay, of any human 
affection whatever. The French wits of the period 20 
were as unpatriotic : but their general deficiency 
in moral principle, not to say their avowed sensu- 
ality and unbelief in all virtue, strictly so called, 
render this accountable enough. We hope, there 



58 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

is a patriotism founded on something better than 
prejudice ; that our country may be dear to us, 
without injury to our philosophy ; that in loving 
and justly prizing all other lands, we may prize 

5 justly, and yet love before all others, our own stern 
Motherland, and the venerable Structure of social 
and moral Life, which Mind has through long ages 
been building up for us there. Surely there is 
nourishment for the better part of man's heart in 

10 all this : surely the roots, that have fixed them- 
selves in the very core of man's being, may be so 
cultivated as to grow up not into briers, but into 
roses, in the field of his life ! Our Scottish sages 
have no such propensities : the field of their life 

15 shows neither briers nor roses ; biit only a flat, 
continuous thrashing-floor for Logic, whereon all 
questions, from the ' Doctrine of Rent ' to the 
'Natural History of Religion,' are thrashed and 
sifted with the same mechanical impartiality ! 

20 With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our litera- 
ture, it cannot be denied that much of this evil is 
past, or rapidly passing away : our chief literary 
men, whatever other faults they may have, no 
longer live among us like a French Colony, or 



ESSAY ON 'bUBNS. 69 

some knot of Propaganda Missionaries ; but like 
natural-born subjects of the soil, partaking and 
sympathizing in all our attachments, humors, and 
habits. Our literature no longer grows in water 
but in mould, and with the true racy virtues of ^ 
the soil and climate. How much of this change 
may be due to Burns, or to any other individual, 
it might, be difficult to estimate. Direct literary 
imitation of Burns was not to be looked for. But 
his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic 10 
subjects, could not but operate from afar; and 
certainly in no heart did the love of country ever 
burn with a warmer glow than in that of Burns : 
' a tide of Scottish prejudice,' as he modestly calls 
this deep and generous feeling, ' had been poured 15 
along his veins; and he felt that it would boil 
there till the flood-gates shut in eternal rest.' It 
seemed to him, as if he could do so little for his 
country, and yet would so gladly have done all. 
One small province stood open for him, — that of 20 
Scottish Song ; and how eagerly he entered on it, 
how devotedly he labored there ! In his toilsome 
journeyings, this object never quits him ; it is the 
little happy-valley of his careworn heart. In the 



60 THOMAS CAELYLE. 

gloom of his own affliction, he eagerly searches 
after some lonely brother of the muse, and rejoices 
to snatch one other name from the oblivion that 
was covering it ! These were early feelings, and 
^ they abode with him to the end : 

... A wish (I mind its power) , 
A wish, that to my latest hour 
Will strongly heave my breast, — 
That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 
10 Some useful plan or book could make, 

Or sing a sang at least. 

The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 

Amang the bearded bear, 
I turn'd my weeding-clips aside, 
15 And spared the symbol dear. 

But to leave the mere literary character of 
Burns, which has already detained us too long. 
Far more interesting than any of his written works, 
as it appears to us, are his acted ones : the Life he 
20 willed and was fated to lead among his fellow-men. 
These Poems are but like little rhymed fragments 
scattered here and there in the grand unrhymed 
Romance of his earthly existence ; and it is only 
when intercalated in this at their proper places. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 61 

that they attain their full measure of significance. 
And this, too, alas, was but a fragment ! The 
plan of a mighty edifice had been sketched ; some 
columns, porticos, firm masses of building, stand 
completed ; the rest more or less clearly indicated ; 5 
with many a far-stretching tendency, which only 
studious and friendly eyes can now trace towards 
the purposed termination. For the work is broken 
off in the middle, almost in the beginning; and 
rises among us, beautiful and sad, at once unfin- 10 
ished and a ruin ! If charitable judgment was 
necessary in estimating his Poems, and justice 
required that the aim and the manifest power to 
fulfil it must often be accepted for the fulfilment ; 
much more is this the case in regard to his Life, 16 
the sum and result of all his endeavors, where his 
difficulties came upon him not in detail only, but 
in mass ; and so much has been left unaccom- 
plished, nay, was mistaken, and altogether marred. 

Properly speaking, there is but one era in the 20 
life of Burns, and that the earliest. We have not 
youth and manhood, but only youth : for, to the 
end, we discern no decisive change in the com- 
plexion of his character ; in his thirty-seventh year. 



62 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

he is still, as it were, in youth. With all that 
resoluteness of judgment, that penetrating insight, 
and singular maturity of intellectual power, ex- 
hibited in his writings, he never attains to any 

5 clearness regarding himself; to the last, he never 
ascertains his peculiar aim, even with such dis- 
tinctness as is common among ordinary men ; and 
therefore never can pursue it with that singleness 
of will, which insures success and some content- 

10 ment to such men. To the last, he wavers between 
two purposes : glorying in his talent, like a true 
poet, he yet cannot consent to make this his chief 
and sole glory, and to follow it as the one thing 
needful, through poverty or riches, through good 

15 or evil report. Another far meaner ambition 
still cleaves to him ; he must dream and struggle 
about a certain ' Rock of Independence ' ; which, 
natural and even admirable as it might be, was 
still but a warring with the world, on the compara- 

20 tively insignificant ground of his being more com- 
pletely or less completely supplied with money 
than others ; of his standing at a higher or at a 
lower altitude in general estimation than others. 
For the world still appears to him, as to the young. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 63 

in borrowed colors ; he expects from it what it 
cannot give to any man ; seeks for contentment, 
not within himself, in action and wise effort, but 
from without, in the kindness of circumstances, 
in love, friendship, honor, pecuniary ease. He 5 
would be happy, not actively and in himself, but 
passively and from some ideal cornucopia of En- 
joyments, not earned by his own labor, but show- 
ered on him by the beneficence of Destiny. Thus, 
like a young man, he cannot gird himself up for 10 
any worthy well-calculated goal, but swerves to 
and fro, between passionate hope and remorseful 
disappointment : rushing onwards with a deep 
tempestuous force, he surmounts or breaks asun- 
der many a barrier ; travels, nay, advances far, but 15 
advancing only under uncertain guidance, is ever 
and anon turned from his path ; and to the last 
cannot reach the only true happiness of a man, 
that of clear decided Activity in the sphere for 
which, by nature and circumstances, he has been 20 
fitted and appointed, 
vi \ We do not say these things in dispraise of 
Burns ; nay perhaps, they but interest us the 
more in his favor. This blessing is not given 



64 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

soonest to the best; but rather, it is often the 
greatest minds that are latest in obtaining it; for 
where most is to be developed, most time may be 
required to develop it. A complex condition had 

5 been assigned him from without ; as complex a 
condition from within : no ' preestablished har- 
mony ' existed between the clay soil of Mossgiel 
and the empyrean soul of Robert Burns ; it was 
not wonderful that the adjustment between them 

10 should have been long postponed, and his arm long 
cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast and 
discordant an economy as he had been appointed 
steward over. Byron was, at his death, but a 
year younger than Burns ; and through life, as it 

15 might have appeared, far more simply situated : 
yet in him too we can trace no such adjustment, 
no such moral manhood ; but at best, and only a 
little before his 6nd, the beginning of what seemed 
such. 

20' By much the most striking incident in Burns's 
Life is his journey to Edinburgh ; but perhaps a 
still more important one is his residence at Irvine, 
so early as in his twenty-third year. Hitherto his 
life had been poor and toilworn ; but otherwise not 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 65 

ungenial, and, with all its distresses, by no means 
unhappy. In his parentage, deducting outward 
circumstances, he had every reason to reckon him- 
self fortunate. His father was a man of thought- 
ful, intense, earnest character, as the best of our 5 
peasants are ; valuing knowledge, possessing some, 
and what is far better and rarer, openminded for 
more : a man with a keen insight and devout 
heart; reverent towards God, friendly therefore 
at once, and fearless towards all that God has 10 
made : in one word, though but a hard-handed 
peasant, a complete and fully unfolded Man, Such 
a father is seldom found in any rank in society ; 
and was worth descending far in society to seek. 
Unfortunately, he was very poor; had he been even 15 
a little richer, almost never so little, the whole 
might have issued far otherwise. Mighty events 
turn on a straw ; the crossing of a brook decides 
the conquest of the world. Had this William 
Burns's small seven acres of nursery-ground any- 20 
wise prospered, the boy Robert had been sent to 
school ; had struggled forward, as so many weaker 
men do, to some university ; come forth not as a 
rustic wonder, but as a regular well-trained Intel- 



66 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

lectual workman, and changed the whole course 
of British literature, — for it lay in him to have 
done this! But the nursery did not prosper; 
poverty sank his whole family below the help of 

5 even our cheap school-system : Burns remained a 
hard-worked ploughboy, and British literature took 
its own course. Nevertheless, even in this rugged 
scene there is much to nourish him. If he drudges, 
it is with his brother, and for his father and mother, 

10 whom he loves, and would fain shield from want. 
Wisdom is not banished from this poor hearth, 
nor the balm of natural feeling: the solemn words. 
Let us worship Grod, are heard there from a ' priest- 
like father' ; if threatenings of unjust men throw 

15 mother and children into tears, these are tears not 
of grief only, but of holiest affection ; every heart 
in that humble group feels itself the closer knit to 
every other ; in their hard warfare they are thei'e 
together, a 'little band of brethren.' Neither iare 

20 such tears, and the deep beauty that dwells in 
them, their only portion. Light visits the hearts 
as it does the eyes of all living : there is a force, 
too, in this youth, that enables him to trample on 
misfortune ; nay, to bind it under his feet to make 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 67 

him sport. For a bold, warm, buoyant humor of 
character has been given him ; and so the thick- 
coming shapes of evil are welcomed with a gay, 
friendly irony, and in their closest pressure he 
bates no jot of heart or hope. Vague yearnings 5 
of ambition fail not, as he grows up ; dreamy fan- 
cies hang like cloud-cities around him ; the cur- 
tain of Existence is slowly rising, in many-colored 
splendor and gloom : and the auroral light of first 
love is gilding his horizon, and the music of song 10 
is on his path ; and so he walks 

. . . in glory and in joy, 
Behind his plough, upon the mountain side. 

^ ; We ourselves know, from the best evidence, 
that up to this date Burns was happy; nay, that 15 
he was the gayest, brightest, most fantastic, fasci- 
nating being to be found in the world; more so 
even than he ever afterwards appeared. But now, 
at this early age, he quits the paternal roof ; goes 
forth into looser, louder, more exciting society; 20 
and becomes initiated in those dissipations, those 
vices, which a certain class of philosophers have 
asserted to be a natural preparative for entering 



68 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

on active life : a kind of mud-bath, in which the 
youth is, as it were, necessitated to steep, and, we 
suppose, cleanse himself, before the real toga of 
Manhood can be laid on him. We shall not dis- 

5 pute much with this class of philosophers ; we 
hope they are mistaken : for Sin and Remorse so 
easily beset us at all stages of life, and are always 
such indifferent company, that it seems hard we 
should, at any stage, be forced and fated not only 

10 to meet but to yield to them, and even serve for a 
term in their leprous armada. We hope it is not 
so. Clear we are, at all events, it cannot be the 
training one receives in this Devil's-service, but 
only our determining to desert from it, that fits us 

15 for true manly Action. We become men, not 
after we have been dissipated, and disappointed 
in the chase of false pleasure ; but after we have 
ascertained, in any way, what impassable barriers 
hem us in through this life ; how mad it is to 

20 hope for contentment to our infinite soul from the 
gifts of this extremely finite world; that a man 
must be sufficient for himself ; and that for suffer- 
ing and enduring there is no remedy but striving 
and doing. Manhood begins when we have in any 



ESSAY ON BUENS. 69 

way made truce with Necessity ; begins even when 
we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most 
part only do ; but begins joyfully and hopefully 
only when we have reconciled ourselves to Neces- 
sity ; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and 5 
felt that in Necessity we are free. Surely, such 
lessons as this last, which, in one shape or other, 
is the grand lesson for every mortal man, are bet- 
ter learned from the lips of a devout mother, in 
the looks and actions of a devout father, while 10 
the heart is yet soft and pliant, than in collision 
with the sharp adamant of Fate, attracting us to 
shipwreck us, when the heart is grown hard, and 
may be broken before it will become contrite. 
Had Burns continued to learn this, as he was 15 
already learning it, in his father's cottage, he 
would have learned it fully, which he never did ; 
and been saved many a lasting aberration, many a 
bitter hour and year of remorseful sorrow. 
LJ\ ii It seems to us another circumstance of fatal 20 
import in Burns's history, that at this time too he 
became involved in the religious quarrels of his 
district ; that he was enlisted and feasted, as the 
fighting man of the New-Light Priesthood, in 



70 THOMAS CAELYLE, 

their highly unprofitable warfare. At the tables 
of these free-minded clergy he learned much more 
than was needful for him. Such liberal ridicule 
of fanaticism awakened in his mind scruples about 

5 Religion itself; and a whole world of Doubts, 
which it required quite another set of conjurers 
than these men to exorcise. We do not say that 
such an intellect as his could have escaped similar 
doubts at some period of his history ; or even that 

10 he could, at a later period, have come through 
them altogether victorious and unharmed : but it 
seems peculiarly unfortunate that this time, above 
all others, should have been fixed for the en- 
counter. For now, with principles assailed by 

15 evil example from without, by ' passions raging 
like demons ' from within, he had little need of 
sceptical misgivings to whisper treason in the heat 
of the battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were 
already defeated. He loses his feeling of inno- 

20 cence ; his mind is at variance with itself ; the old 
divinity no longer presides there ; but wild Desires 
and wild Repentance alternately oppress him. Ere 
long, too, he has committed himself before the 
world ; his character for sobriety, dear to a Scottish 



ESSAY ON BURNS, 71 

peasant as few corrupted worldlings can even con- 
ceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men ; and his only 
refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, 
and is but a refuge of lies. The blackest desper- 
ation now gathers over him, broken only by red 5 
lightnings of remorse. The whole fabric of his 
life is blasted asunder ; for now not only his char- 
acter, but his personal liberty, is to be lost ; men 
and Fortune are leagued for his hurt; 'hungry 
Ruin has him in the wind.' He sees no escape 10 
but the saddest of all : exile from his loved coun- 
try, to a country in every sense inhospitable and 
abhorrent to him. While the 'gloomy night is 
gathering fast,' in mental storm and solitude, as 
well as in physical, he sings his wild farewell to 15 
Scotland : 

Earewell, my friends ; farewell, my foes ! 

My peace with these, my love with those : 

The bursting tears my heart declare ; 

Adieu, my native banks of Ayr ! 20 

U i^ Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods; but 
still a false transitory light, and no real sunshine. 
He is invited to Edinburgh ; hastens thither with 
anticipating heart; is welcomed as in a triumph, 



72 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

and with universal blandishment and acclamation; 
whatever is wisest, whatever is greatest or loveliest 
there, gathers round him, to gaze on his face, to 
show him honor, sympathy, affection. Burns's 

5 appearance among the sages and nobles of Edin- 
burgh must be regarded as one of the most singu- 
lar phenomena in modern Literature ; almost like 
the appearance of some Napoleon among the 
crowned sovereigns of modern Politics. For it is 

10 nowise as ' a mockery king,' set there by favor, 
transiently and for a purpose, that he will let him- 
self be treated ; still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose 
sudden elevation turns his too weak head : but he 
stands there on his own basis ; cool, unastonished, 

15 holding his equal rank from Nature herself ; put- 
ting forth no claim which there is not strength in 
him, as well as about him, to vindicate. Mr. Lock- 
hart has some forcible observations on this point. 
iXXj 'It needs no effort of imagination,' says he, ' to 

20 conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of 
scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors) 
must have been in the presence of this big-boned 
black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great flash- 
ing eyes, who, having forced his way among them 



IJSSAY ON BURNS, 73 

from the plough-tail at a single stride, manifested 
in the whole strain of his bearing and conversation 
a most thorough conviction, that in the society of 
the most eminent men of his nation he was exactly 
where he was entitled to be ; hardly deigned to 5 
flatter them by exhibiting even an occasional 
symptom of being flattered by their notice ; by 
turns calmly measured himself against the most 
cultivated ^understandings of his time in discus- 
sion ; overpowered the hon-mots of the most cele- 10 
brated convivialists by broad floods of merriment, 
impregnated with all the burning life of genius ; 
astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the 
thrice-piled folds of social reserve, by compelling 
them to tremble, — nay, to tremble visibly, — be- 15 
neath the fearless touch of natural pathos ; and 
all this without indicating the smallest willingness 
to be ranked among those professional ministers 
of excitement, who are content to be paid in 
money and smiles for doing what the spectators 20 
and auditors would be ashamed of doing in their 
own persons, even if they had the power of doing 
it; and last, and probably worst of all, who was 
knowxi to be in the habit of enlivening societies 



u 



u 



74 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

which they would have scorned to approach, still 
more frequently than their own, with eloquence 
no less magnificent ; with wit, in all likelihood still 
more daring ; often enough, as the superiors whom 

5 he fronted without alarm might have guessed from 
the beginning, and had ere long no occasion to 
guess, with wit pointed at themselves.' 

-, The farther we remove from this scene, the 
more singular will it seem to us : details of the 

10 exterior aspect of it are already full of interest. 
Most readers recollect Mr. Walker's personal in- 
terviews with Burns as among the best passages of 
his Narrative : a time will come when this reminis- 
cence of Sir Walter Scott's, slight though it is, 

15 will also be precious : 

' As for Burns,' writes Sir Walter, ' I may truly 
say, Virgilium vidi tantilm, I was a lad of fifteen 
in 1786-7, when he came first to Edinburgh, but 
had sense and feeling enough to be much inter- 

20 ested in his poetry, and would have given the 
world to know him : but I had very little acquain- 
tance with any literary people, and still less with 
the gentry of the west country, the two sets that 
he most frequented. Mr. Thomas Grierson was 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 75 

at that time a clerk of my father's. He knew 
Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings 
to dinner ; but had no opportunity to keep his 
word ; otherwise I might have seen more of this 
distinguished man. As it was, I saw him one day 5 
at the late venerable Professor Ferguson's, where 
there were several gentlemen of literary reputation, 
among whom I remember the celebrated Mr. Dugald 
Stewart. Of course, we youngsters sat silent, 
looked and listened. The only thing I remember lo 
which was remarkable in Burns's manner, was the 
effect produced upon him by a print of Bunbury's, 
representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his 
dog sitting in misery on one side, — on the other, 
his widow, with a child in her arms. These lines 15 
were written beneath : 

'' Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain ; 
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew. 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 20 

Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery baptized in tears." 

O ' liurns seemed much affected by the print, or 
rather by the ideas which it suggested to his mind. 



76 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

He actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines 
were ; and it chanced that nobody but myself re- 
membered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem 
of Langhorne's called by the unpromising title of 

5 " The Justice of Peace." I whispered my infor- 
mation to a friend present; he mentioned it to 
Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, 
which, though of mere civility, I then received and 
still recollect with very great pleasure. 

10 ' His person was strong and robust ; his manners 
rustic, not clownish ; a sort of dignified plainness 
and simplicity, which received part of its effect 
perhaps from one's knowledge of his extraordinary 
talents. His features are represented in Mr. 

16 Nasmyth's picture : but to me it conveys the idea 
that they are diminished, as if seen in perspective. 
I think his countenance was more massive than it 
looks in any of the portraits. I should have 
taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for 

20 a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch 
school, i,e. none of your modern agriculturists 
who keep laborers for their drudgery, but the 
douce gudeman who held his own plough. There 
was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness 



JESS AY OlSr BURNS. 77 

in all his lineaments ; the eye alone, I think, in- 
dicated the poetical character and temperament. 
It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed 
(I say literally glowed^ when he spoke with feeling 
or interest. I never saw such another eye in a 5 
human head, though I have seen the most distin- 
guished men of my time. His conversation 
expressed perfect self-confidence, without the 
slightest presumption. Among the men who were 
the most learned of their time and country, he 10 
expressed himself with perfect firmness, but with- 
out the least intrusive forwardness ; and when he 
differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express 
it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty. I 
do not remember any part of his conversation dis- 15 
tinctly enough to be quoted; nor did I ever see 
him again, except in the street, where he did not 
recognize me, as I could not expect he should. 
He was much caressed in Edinburgh : but (con- 
sidering what literary emoluments have been since 20 
his day) the efforts made for his relief were ex- 
tremely trifling. 
^ ^ ' I remember, on this occasion I mention, I 
thought Burns's acquaintance with English poetry 



78 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

was rather limited ; and also that, having twenty 
times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Fer- 
giisson, he talked of them with too much humility 
as his models : there was doubtless national predi- 

5 lection in his estimate. 

C •^ ' This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have 

only to add, that his dress corresponded with his 

manner. He was like a farmer dressed in his 

best to dine with the laird. I do not speak in 

10 malam partem^ when I say, I never saw a man in 
company with his superiors in station or informa- 
tion more perfectly free from either the reality or 
the affectation of embarrassment. I was told, but 
did not observe it, that his address to females was 

15 extremely deferential, and always with a turn 
either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged 
their attention particularly. I have heard the 
late Duchess of Gordon remark this. — I do not 
know anything I can add to these recollections of 

20 forty years since.' 

t^ "^ The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze 

of favor; the calm, unaffected, manly manner in 

which he not only bore it, but estimated its value, 

has justly been regarded as the best proof that 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 79 

could be given of his real vigor and integrity of 
mind. A little natural vanity, some touches of 
hypocritical modesty, some glimmerings of affec- 
tation, at least some fear of being thought affected, 
we could have pardoned in almost any man ; but 5 
no such indication is to be traced here. In his 
unexampled situation the young peasant is not a 
moment perplexed ; so many strange lights do not 
confuse him, do not lead him astray. Neverthe- 
less, we cannot but perceive that this winter did 10 
him great and lasting injury. A somewhat clearer 
knowledge of men's affairs, scarcely of their char- 
acters, it did afford him ; but a sharper feeling of 
Fortune's unequal arrangements in their social 
destiny it also left with him. He had seen the 15 
gay and gorgeous arena, in which the powerful 
are born to play their parts ; nay, had himself stood 
in the midst of it; and he felt more bitterly than 
ever, that here he was but a looker-on, and had no 
part or lot in that splendid game. From this 20 
time a jealous indignant fear of social degradation 
takes possession of him ; and perverts, so far as 
aught could pervert, his private contentment, and 
his feelings towards his richer fellows. It was 



80 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

clear to Burns that he had talent enough to make 
a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, could he but 
have rightly willed this ; it was clear also that he 
willed something far different, and therefore could 

5 not make one. Unhappy it was that he had not 
power to choose the one, and reject the other; but 
must halt forever between two opinions, two ob- 
jects; making hampered advancement towards 
either. But so is it with many men : we ' long 

10 for the merchandise, yet would fain keep the 
price'; and so stand chaffering with Fate, in vex- 
atious altercation, till the night come, and our fair 
is over! 
'." L[ The Edinburgh Learned of that period were in 

15 general more noted for clearness of head than for 
warmth of heart : with the exception of the good 
old Blacklock, whose help was too ineffectual, 
scarcely one among them seems to have looked at 
Burns with any true sympathy, or indeed much 

20 otherwise than as at a highly curious thing. By 
the great also he is treated in the customary 
fashion ; entertained at their tables and dismissed : 
certain modica of pudding and praise are, from time 
to time, gladly exchanged for the fascination of his 



:essay on BUEJsrs, 81 

presence ; which exchange once effected, the bar- 
gain is finished, and each party goes his several 
way. At the end of this strange season, Burns 
gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and medi- 
tates on the chaotic future. In money he is some- 5 
what richer ; in fame and the show of happiness, 
infinitely richer; but in the substance of it, as 
poor as ever. Nay, poorer ; for his heart is now 
maddened still more with the fever of worldly 
Ambition; and through long years the disease 10 
will rack him with unprofitable sufferings, and 
weaken his strength for all true and nobler aims. 
"'"'What Burns was next to do or to avoid ; how a 
man so circumstanced was now to guide himself 
towards his true advantage, might at this point of 15 
time have been a question for the wisest. It was 
a question too, which apparently he was left alto- 
gether to answer for himself: of his learned or 
rich patrons it had not struck any individual to 
turn a thought on this so trivial matter. Without 20 
claiming for Burns the praise of perfect sagacity, 
we must say, that his Excise and Farm scheme 
does not seem to us a very unreasonable one; that 
we should be at a loss, even now, to suggest one 



82 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

decidedly better. Certain of his admirers have felt 
scandalized at his ever resolving to gauge ; and 
would have had him lie at the pool, till the spirit 
of Patronage stirred the waters, that so, with one 

6 friendly plunge, all his sorrows might be healed. 
Unwise counsellors ! They know not the manner 
of this spirit ; and how, in the lap of most golden 
dreams, a man might have happiness, were it not 
that in the interim he must die of hunger ! It 

10 reflects credit on the manliness and sound sense 
of Burns, that he felt so early on what ground he 
was standing ; and preferred self-help, on the hum- 
blest scale, to dependence and inaction, though 
with hope of far more splendid possibilities. But 

15 even these possibilities were not rejected in his 
scheme : he might expect, if it chanced that he 
had any friend, to rise, in no long period, into 
something even Uke opulence and leisure ; while 
again, if it chanced that he had no friend, he could 

20 still live in security ; and for the rest, he ' did not 
intend to borrow honor from any profession.' We 
reckon that his plan was honest and well-calcu- 
lated : all turned on the execution of it. Doubt- 
less it failed ; yet not, we believe, from any vice 



ESSAY OJSr BURNS. 83 

inherent in itself. Nay, after all, it was no failure 
of external means, but of internal, that overtook 
Burns. His was no bankruptcy of the purse, but 
of the soul ; to his last day, he owed no man any- 
thing. 6 
5 [r Meanwhile he begins well : with two good and 
wise actions. His donation to his mother, munifi- 
cent from a man whose income had lately been 
seven pounds a-year, was worthy of him, and not 
more than worthy. Generous also, and worthy of lo 
him, was the treatment of the woman whose life's 
welfare now depended on his pleasure. A friendly 
observer might have hoped serene days for him : 
his mind is on the true road to peace with itself : 
what clearness he still wants will be given as he 15 
proceeds ; for the best teacher of duties, that still 
lie dim to us, is the Practice of those we see and 
have at hand. Had the ' patrons of genius,' who 
could give him nothing, but taken nothing from 
him, at least nothing more ! The wounds of his 20 
heart would have healed, vulgar ambition would 
have died away. Toil and Frugality would have 
been welcome, since Virtue dwelt with them ; and 
Poetry would have shone through them as of old ; 



84 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

and in her clear ethereal light, which was his own 
by birthright, he might have looked down on his 
earthly destiny, and all its obstructions, not with 
patience only, but with love. 

5 But the patrons of genius would not have it so. 
Picturesque tourists,^ all manner of fashionable 
danglers after literature, and, far worse, all manner 
of convivial Maecenases, hovered round him in his 
retreat ; and his good as well as his weak qualities 

10 secured them influence over him. He was flattered 
by their notice ; and his warm social nature made 
it impossible for him to shake them off, and hold 
on his w^ay apart from them. These men, as we 
believe, were proximately the means of his ruin. 

^ There is one little sketch by certain ' English gentlemen ' of this 
class, which, though adopted in Carrie's Narrative, and since then re- 
peated in most others, we have all along felt an invincible disposition to 
regard as imaginary : * On a rock that projected into the stream, they 
saw a man employed in angling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap 
made of fox-skin on his head, a loose greatcoat tixed round him by a belt, 
from which depended an enormous Highland broad-sword. It was 
Burns.' Now, we rather think, it was not Burns. For, to say nothing 
of the fox-skin cap, the loose and quite Hibernian watchcoat with the 
belt, what are we to make of this * enormous Highland broad-sword * 
depending from him ? More especially, as there is no word of parish 
constables on the outlook to see whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had an 
eye to his own midriif or that of the public ! Burns, of all men, had the 
least need, and the least tendency, to seek for distinction, either in his 
own eyes, or those of others, by such poor mummeries. 



ESSAY ON BURNS, 85 

Not that they meant him any ill ; they only meant 
themselves a little good ; if he suffered harm, let 
him look to it ! But they wasted his precious 
time and his precious talent ; they disturbed his 
composure, broke down his returning habits of 5 
temperance and assiduous contented exertion. 
Their pampering was baneful to him ; their cruelty, 
which soon followed, was equally baneful. The 
old grudge against Fortune's inequality awoke 
with new bitterness in their neighborhood; and 10 
Burns had no retreat but to ' the Rock of Inde- 
pendence,' which is but an air-castle after all, that 
looks well at a distance, but will screen no one 
from real wind and wet. Flushed with irregular 
excitement, exasperated alternately by contempt 15 
of others, and contempt of himself. Burns was no 
longer regaining his peace of mind, but fast losing 
it forever. There was a hoUowness at the heart of 
his life, for his conscience did not now approve 
what he was doing. 20 

^ '> Amid the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of boot- 
less remorse, and angry discontent with Fate, his 
true loadstar, a life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay, 
with Famine if it must be so, was too often alto- 



86 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

gether hidden from his eyes. And yet he sailed 
a sea, where without some such loadstar there was 
no right steering. Meteors of French Politics rise 
before him, but these were not his stars. An ac- 

5 cident this, which hastened, but did not originate, 
his worst distresses. In the mad contentions of 
that time, he comes in collision with certain 
official Superiors; is wounded by them; cruelly 
lacerated, we should say, could a dead mechanical 

10 implement, in any case, be called cruel: and 
shrinks, in indignant pain, into deeper self-seclu- 
sion, into gloomier moodiness than ever. His life 
has now lost its unity : it is a life of fragments ; 
led with little aim, beyond the melancholy one of 

15 securing its own continuance, — in fits of wild 
false joy when such offered, and of black despond- 
ency when they passed away. His character 
before the world begins to suffer : calumny is busy 
with him; for a miserable man makes more 

20 enemies than friends. Some faults he has fallen 
into, and a thousand misfortunes ; but deep crim- 
inality is what he stands accused of, and they that 
are not without sin cast the first stone at him ! 
For is he not a well-wisher to the French Revolu- 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 87 

tion, a Jacobin, and therefore in that one act guilty 
of all ? These accusations, political and moral, it 
has since appeared, were false enough : but the 
world hesitated little to credit them. Nay, his 
convivial Maecenases themselves were not the last 5 
to do it. There is reason to believe that, in his 
later years, the Dumfries Aristocracy^ had partly 
withdrawn themselves from Burns, as from a 
tainted person, no longer worthy of their acquaint- 
ance. That painful class, stationed, in all provin- 10 
cial cities, behind the outmost breastwork of 
Gentility, there to stand siege and do battle against 
the intrusions of Grocerdom and Grazierdom, had 
actually seen dishonor in the society of Burns, and 
branded him with their veto ; had, as we vulgarly 15 
say, cut him ! We find one passage in this Work 
of Mr. Lockhart's, which will not out of our 
thoughts : 
^ Q i ^ gentleman of that county, whose name I 
have already more than once had occasion to refer 20 
to, has often told me that he was seldom more 
grieved, than when riding into Dumfries one fine 
summer evening about this time to attend a county 
ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady 



88 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

side of the principal street of the town, while the 
opposite side was gay with successive groups of 
gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the 
festivities of the night, not one of whom appeared 

5 willing to recognize him. The horseman dis- 
mounted, and joined Burns, who on his proposing 
to cross the street said : " Nay, nay, my young 
friend, that's all over now " ; and quoted, after a 
pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie's 

10 pathetic ballad : 

. * ' His bonnet stood ance f u' fair on his brow, 

His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new ; 
But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, 
And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing. 

15 *' O, were we young as we ance hae been, 

We sud hae been gallopping down on yon green, 
And linking it ower the lily-white lea ! 
And werena my heart lights I wad die.^'' 

It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings 
20 on certain subjects escape in this fashion. He, 
immediately after reciting these verses, assumed 
the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; 
and taking his young friend home with him, en- 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 89 

tertained him very agreeably till the hour of the 
ball arrived.' 
\^ D Alas ! when we think that Burns now sleeps 
' where bitter indignation can no longer lacerate 
his heart,' ^ and that most of those fair dames and 5 
frizzled gentlemen already lie at his side, where 
the breastwork of gentility is quite thrown down, 
— who would not sigh over the thin delusions 
and foolish toys that divide heart from heart, and 
make man unmerciful to his brother ! 10 

Ij \ It was not now to be hoped that the genius of 
Burns would ever reach maturity, or accomplish 
aught worthy of itself. His spirit was jarred in 
its melody ; not the soft breath of natural feeling, 
but the rude hand of Fate, was now sweeping 15 
over the strings. And yet what harmony was in 
him, what music even in his discords ! How the 
wild tones had a charm for the simplest and the 
wisest ; and all men felt and knew that here also 
. was one of the Gifted ! ' If he entered an inn at 20 
midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the 
news of his arrival circulated from the cellar to 
the garret ; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, the 

^ Ubi sseva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. Swift's Epitaph. 



90 THOMAS CARLYLE, 

landlord and all his guests were assembled ! ' 
Some brief pure moments of poetic life were yet 
appointed him, in the composition of his Songs. 
We can understand how he grasped at this em- 

5 ployment; and how too, he spurned all other 
reward for it but what the labor itself brought 
him. For the soul of Burns, though scathed and 
marred, was yet living in its full moral strength, 
though sharply conscious of its errors and abase- 

10 ment ; and here, in his destitution and degrada- 
tion, was one act of seeming nobleness and 
self-devotedness left even for him to perform. 
He felt too, that with all the ' thoughtless follies ' 
that had ' laid him low,' the world was unjust and 

15 cruel to him ; and he silently appealed to another 
and calmer time. Not as a hired soldier, but as a 
patriot, would he strive for the glory of his 
country : so he cast from him the poor sixpence 
a-day, and served zealously as a volunteer. Let 

20 us not grudge him this last luxury of his exist- 
ence ; let him not have appealed to us in vain ! 
The money was not necessarj^to him ; he struggled 
through without it: long since, these guineas 
would have been gone, and now the high-minded- 



ESSAY ON BUBNS, 91 

ness of refusing them will plead for him in all 
hearts forever. 
O We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns's life ; 
for matters had now taken such a shape with him 
as could not long continue. If improvement was 5 
not to be looked for, Nature could only for a 
limited time maintain this dark and maddening 
warfare against the world and itself. We are not 
medically informed whether any continuance of 
years was, at this period, probable for Burns ; 10 
whether his death is to be looked on as in some 
sense an accidental event, or only as the natural 
consequence of the long series of events that had 
preceded. The latter seems to be the likelier 
opinion ; and yet it is by no means a certain one. 15 
At all events, as we have said, some change could 
not be very distant. Three gates of deliverance, 
it seems to us, were open for Burns : clear poeti- 
cal activity ; madness ; or death. The first, with 
longer life, was still possible, though not probable ; 20 
for physical causes were beginning to be con- 
cerned in it : and yet Burns had an iron resolu- 
tion ; could he but have seen and felt, that not 
only his highest glory, but his first duty, and the 



92 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

true medicine for all his woes, lay here. The 
second was still less probable ; for his mind was 
ever among the clearest and firmest. So the milder 
third gate was opened for him : and he passed, not 
5 softly yet speedily, into that still country, where 
the hail-storms and fire-showers do not reach, and 
the heaviest-laden wayfarer at length lays down 
his load ! 

V; ' Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how 

10 he sank unaided by any real help, uncheered by 
any wise sympathy, generous minds have some- 
times figured to themselves, with a reproachful 
sorrow, that much might have been done for him ; 
that by counsel, true affection and friendly minis- 

15 trations, he might have been saved to himself and 
the world. We question whether there is not 
more tenderness of heart than soundness of judg- 
ment in these suggestions. It seems dubious to 
us whether the richest, wisest, most benevolent 

20 individual could have lent Burns any effectual 
help. Counsel, which seldom profits any one, he 
did not need ; in his understanding, he knew the 
right from the wrong, as well perhaps as any man 



ESSAY ON BUBJSrS. 93 

ever did ; but the persuasion, which would have 
availed him, lies not so much in the head as in 
the heart, where no argument or expostulation 
could have assisted much to implant it. As to 
money again, we do not believe that this was his 5 
essential want ; or Avell see how any private man 
could, even presupposing Burns's consent, have 
bestowed on him an independent fortune, with 
much prospect of decisive advantage. It is a 
mortifying truth, that two men in any rank of 10 
society, could hardly be found virtuous enough 
to give money, and to take it as a necessary gift, 
without injury to the moral entireness of one or 
both. But eo stands the fact: Friendship, in the 
old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists ; 15 
except in the cases of kindred or other legal 
affinity, it is in reality no longer expected, or 
recognized as a virtue among men. A close ob- 
server of manners has pronounced ' Patronage,' 
that is, pecuniary or other economic furtherance, 20 
to be ' twice cursed ' ; cursing him that gives, 
and him that takes ! And thus, in regard to 
outward matters also, it has become the rule, 
as in regard to inward it always was and must 



94 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

be the rule, that no one shall look for effectual 
help to another; but that each shall rest con- 
tented with what help he can afford himself. 
Such, we say, is the principle of modern Honor; 

5 naturally enough growing out of that sentiment 
of Pride, which we inculcate and encourage as 
the basis of our whole social morality. Many a 
poet has been poorer than Burns ; but no one was 
ever prouder : we may question whether, without 

10 great precautions, even a pension from Royalty 

would not have galled and encumbered, more than 

actually assisted him. 

r A Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with 

another class of Burns's admirers, who accuse the 

15 higher ranks among us of having ruined Burns by 
their selfish neglect of him. We have already 
stated our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, 
had it been offered, would have been accepted, or 
could have proved very effectual. We shall 

20 readily admit, however, that much was to be done 
for Burns ; that many a poisoned arrow might 
have been warded from his bosom ; many an en- 
tanglement in his path cut asunder by the hand 
of the powerful ; and light and heat, shed on him 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 95 

from high places, would have made his humble 
atmosphere more genial; and the softest heart 
then breathing might have lived and died with 
some fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant farther, 
and for Burns it is granting much, that, with all 5 
his pride, he would have thanked, even with ex- 
aggerated gratitude, any one who had cordially 
befriended him: patronage, unless once cursed, 
needed not to have been twice so. At all events, 
the poor promotion he desired in his calling might 10 
have been granted : it was his own scheme, there- 
fore likelier than any other to be of service. All 
this it might have been a luxury, nay, it was a 
duty, for our nobility to have done. No part of 
all this, however, did any of them do; or appar- 15 
ently attempt, or wish to do : so much is granted 
against them. But what then is the amount of 
their blame ? Simply that they were men of the 
world, and walked by the principles of such men ; 
that they treated Burns, as other nobles and other 20 
commoners had done other poets ; as the English 
did Shakspeare ; as King Charles and his Cava- 
liers did Butler, as King Philip and his Grandees 
did Cervantes. Do men gather grapes of thorns ; 



96 THOMAS CARLTLE. 

or shall we cut down our thorns for yielding only 
Si fence and haws? How, indeed, could the 'nobil- 
ity and gentry of his native land ' hold out any 
help to this ' Scottish Bard, proud of his name and 

5 country ' ? Were the nobility and gentry so much 
as able rightly to help themselves ? Had they not 
their game to preserve ; their borough interests to 
strengthen ; dinners, therefore, of various kinds to 
eat and give ? Were their means more than ade- 

10 quate to all this business, or less than adequate ? 
Less than adequate, in general ; few of them in 
reality were richer than Burns ; many of them 
were poorer; for sometimes they had to wring 
their supplies, as with thumbscrews, from the 

15 hard hand ; and, in their need of guineas, to for- 
get their duty of mercy ; which Burns was never 
reduced to do. Let us pity and forgive them. 
The game they preserved and shot, the dinners 
they ate and gave, the borough interests they 

20 strengthened, the little Babylons they severally 
builded by the glory of their might, are all melted 
or melting back into the primeval Chaos, as man's 
merely selfish endeavors are fated to do : and here 
was an action, extending, in virtue of its worldly 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 97 

influence, we may say, through all time ; in virtue 
of its moral nature, beyond all time, being immor- 
tal as the Spirit of Goodness itself ; this action 
was offered them to do, and light was not given 
them to do it. Let us pity and forgive them. 5 
But better than pity, let us go and do otherwise. 
Human suffering did not end with the life of 
Burns ; neither was the solemn mandate, ' Love 
one another, bear one another's burdens,' given 
to the rich only, but to all men. True, we shall 10 
find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our aid or 
our pity ; but celestial natures, groaning under the 
fardels of a weary life, we shall still find; and 
that wretchedness which Fate has rendered voice- 
less and tuneless is not the least wretched, but the 15 
most. 
1 f Still, we do not think that the blame of Burns's 
failure lies chiefly with the world. The world, it 
seems to us, treated him with more rather than 
with less kindness than it usually shows to such 20 
men. It has ever, we fear, shown but small favor 
to its Teachers: hunger and nakedness, perils and 
revilings, the prison, the cross, the poison-chalice 
have, in most times and countries, been the mar- 



98 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

ket>price it has offered for Wisdom, the welcome 
with which it has greeted those who have come to 
enlighten and purify it. Homer and Socrates, and 
the Christian Apostles, belong to old days ; but 

6 the world's Martyrology was not completed with 
these. Roger Bacon and Galileo languish in 
priestly dungeons ; Tasso pines in the cell of a 
madhouse ; Camoens dies begging on the streets 
of Lisbon. So neglected, so ' persecuted they the 

10 Prophets,' not in Judea only, but in all places 
where men have been. We reckon that every 
poet of Burns's order is, or should be, a prophet 
and teacher to his age ; that he has no right to 
expect great kindness from it, but rather is bound 

15 to do it great kindness ; that Burns, in particular, 

experienced fully the usual proportion of the 

world's goodness ; and that the blame of his failure, 

as we have said, lies not chiefly with the world. 

\^ (j Where, then, does it lie ? We are forced to an- 

20 swer : With himself ; it is his inward, not his out- 
ward misfortunes that bring him to the dust. 
Seldom, indeed, is it otherwise ; seldom is a life 
morally wrecked but the grand cause lies in some 
internal mal-arrangement, some want less of good 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 99 

fortune than of good guidance. Nature fashions 
no creature without implanting in it the strength 
needful for its action and duration; least of all 
does she so neglect her masterpiece and darling, 
the poetic soul. Neither can we believe that it is 5 
in the power of ani/ external circumstances utterly 
to ruin the mind of a man ; nay, if proper wisdom 
be given him, even so much as to affect its essen- 
tial health and beauty. The sternest sum-total of 
all worldly misfortunes is Death ; nothing more 10 
can lie in the cup of human woe : yet many men, 
in all ages, have triumphed over Death, and led it 
captive ; converting its physical victory into a 
moral victory for themselves, into a seal and im- 
mortal consecration for all that their past life had 15 
achieved. What has been done, may be done 
again : nay, it is but the degree and not the kind 
of such heroism that differs in different seasons ; 
for without some portion of this spirit, not of 
boisterous daring, but of silent fearlessness, of 20 
Self-denial in all its forms, no good man, in any 
scene or time, has ever attained to be good. 
/ ": We have already stated the error of Burns ; 
and mourned over it, rather than blamed it. It 

LofC. 



100 THOMAS CAELYLE, 

was the want of unity in his purposes, of consist- 
ency in his aims ; the hapless attempt to mingle in 
friendly union the common spirit of the world with 
the spirit of poetry, which is of a far different and 

5 altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns was noth- 
ing wholly, and Burns could be nothing, no itian 
formed as he was can be anything, by halves. 
The heart, not of a mere hot-blooded, popular 
Verse-monger, or poetical Restaurateur^ but of a 

10 true Poet and Singer, worthy of the old religious 
heroic times, had been given him : and he fell in 
an age, not of heroism and religion, but of scep- 
ticism, selfishness and triviality, when true Noble- 
ness was little understood, and its place supplied 

15 by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and un- 
fruitful principle of Pride. The influences of 
that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature, to say 
nothing of his highly untoward situation, made it 
more than usually difficult for him to cast aside, 

20 or rightly subordinate ; the better spirit that was 
within him ever sternly demanded its rights, its 
supremacy: he spent his life in endeavoring to 
reconcile these two ; and lost it, as he must lose 
it, without reconciling them. 



^.S^^F ON BURNS. 101 

\C(^ Burns was born poor ; and born also to continue 
poor, for he would not endeavor to be otherwise : 
this it had been well could he have once for all 
admitted, and considered as finally settled. He 
was poor, truly ; but hundreds even of his own 5 
class and order of minds have been poorer, yet 
have suffered nothing deadly from it : nay, his own 
Father had a far sorer battle with ungrateful 
destiny than his was ; and he did not yield to it, 
but died courageously warring, and to all moral 10 
intents prevailing, against it. True, Burns had 
little means, had even little time for poetry, his 
only real pursuit and vocation ; but so much the 
more precious was what little he had. In all 
these external respects his case was hard ; but 15 
very far from the hardest. Poverty, incessant 
drudgery and much worse evils, it has often been 
the lot of Poets and wise men to strive with, and 
their glory to conquer. Locke was banished as a 
traitor ; and wrote his Essay on the Human Under- 20 
standing sheltering himself in a Dutch garret. 
Was Milton rich or at his ease when he composed 
Paradise Lost ? Not only low, but fallen from a 
height: not, only poor, but impoverished; in dark- 



102 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

ness and with dangers compassed round, he sang 
his immortal song, and found fit audience, though 
few. Did not Cervantes finish his work, a maimed 
soldier and in prison ? Nay, was not the Araucana 

5 which Spain acknowledges as its Epic, written 

without even the aid of paper ; on scraps of leather, 

as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any 

moment from that wild warfare ? 

\. Q And what, then, had these men, which Burns 

10 wanted ? Two things ; both which, it seems to us, 
are indispensable for such men. They had a true, 
religious principle of morals; and a single, not 
a double aim in their activity. They were not 
self-seekers and self -worshippers ; but seekers and 

15 worshippers of something far better than Self. 
Not personal enjoyment was their object; but a 
high, heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of 
heavenly Wisdom, in one or the other form, ever 
hovered before them ; in which cause they neither 

20 shrank from suffering, nor called on the earth to wit- 
ness it as something wonderful ; but patiently en- 
dured, counting it blessedness enough so to spend 
and be spent. Thus the ' golden-calf of Self-love,' 
however curiously carved, was not their Deity; 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 103 

but the Invisible Goodness, which alone is man's 
reasonable service. This feeling was as a celestial 
fountain, whose streams refreshed into gladness 
and beauty all the provinces of their otherwise too 
desolate existence. In a word, they willed one 5 
thing, to which all other things were subordinated 
and made subservient; and therefore they accom- 
plished it. The wedge will rend rocks ; but its edge 
must be sharp and single : if it be double, the 
wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend nothing. 10 
'V Part of this superiority these men owed to 
their age ; in which heroism and devotedness were 
still practised, or at least not yet disbelieved in : 
but much of it likewise they owed to themselves. 
With Burns, again, it was different. His morality, 15 
in most of its practical points, is that of a mere 
worldly man; enjoyment, in a finer or coarser 
shape, is the only thing he longs and strives for. 
A noble instinct sometimes raises him above this ; 
but an instinct only, and acting only for moments. 20 
He has no Religion ; in the shallow age, where his 
days were cast. Religion was not discriminated 
from the New and Old Light forms of Religion ; 
and was, with these, becoming obsolete in the 



104 THOMAS CABLYLE. 

minds of men. His heart, indeed, is alive with a 
trembling adoration, but there is no temple in his 
understanding. He lives in darkness and in the 
shadow of doubt. His religion, 'at best, is an 

5 anxious wish ; like that of Rabelais, ' a great Per- 
haps.' 
. \ He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart; 
could he but have loved it purely, and with his 
whole undivided heart, it had been well. For 

10 Poetry, as Burns could have followed it, is but an- 
other form of Wisdom, of Religion ; is itself Wis- 
dom and Religion. But this also was denied him-. 
His poetry is a stray vagrant gleam, which will not 
be extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the 

15 true light of his path, but is often a wildfire that 
misleads him. It was not necessary for Burns to be 
rich, to be, or to seem, ' independent ' ; but it was 
necessary for him to be at one with his own heart ; 
to place what was highest in his nature highest 

20 also in his life ; ' to seek within himself for that 
consistency and sequence, which external events 
would forever refuse him.' He was born a poet ; 
poetry was the celestial element of his being, and 
should have been the soul of his whole endeav- 



ESSAY ON BUBNS. 105 

ors. Lifted into that serene ether, whither he 
had wings given him to mount, he would have 
needed no other elevation : poverty, neglect and all 
evil, save the desecration of himself and his Art, 
were a small matter to him ; the pride and the pas- 5 
sions of the world lay far beneath his feet ; and he 
looked down alike on noble and slave, on prince 
and beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man, 
with clear recognition, with brotherly affection, 
with sympathy, with pity. Nay, we question 10 
whether for his culture as a Poet poverty and 
much suffering for a season were not absolutely 
advantageous. Great men, in looking back over 
their lives, have testified to that effect. ' I would 
not for much,' says Jean Paul, ' that I had been 15 
born richer.' And yet Paul's birth was poor 
enough ; for, in another place, he adds : ' The 
prisoner's allowance is bread and water ; and I 
had often only the latter.' But the gold that is 
refined in the hottest furnace comes out the purest ; 20 
or, as he has himself expressed it, ' the canary- 
bird sings sweeter the longer it has been trained 
in a darkened cage.' 
1 *j A man like Burns might have divided his hours 



106 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

between poetry and virtuous industry; industry 
which all true feeling sanctions, nay, prescribes, 
and which has a beauty, for that cause, beyond the 
pomp of thrones : but to divide his hours between 

5 poetry and rich men's banquets was an ill-starred 
and inauspicious attempt. How could he be at 
ease at such banquets ? What had he to do there, 
mingling his music with the coarse roar of alto- 
gether earthly voices ; brightening the thick smoke 

10 of intoxication with fire lent him from heaven? 
Was it his aim to enjoi/ life ? To-morrow he must 
go drudge as an Exciseman ! We wonder not 
that Burns became moody, indignant, and at times 
an offender against certain rules of society; but 

15 rather that he did not grow utterly frantic, and 
run amuck against them all. How could a man, 
so falsely placed, by his own or others' fault, ever 
know contentment or peaceable diligence for an 
hour ? What he did, under such perverse guid- 

20 ance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with 
astonishment at the natural strength and worth of 
his character. 

^ ""' Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverse- 

• ness ; but not in others ; only in himself ; least 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 107 

of all in simple increase of wealth and worldly 
' respectability.' We hope we have now heard 
enough about the efficacy of wealth for poetry, 
and to make poets happy. Nay, have we not seen 
another instance of it in these very days? Byron, 5 
a man of an endowment considerably less ethereal 
than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a 
Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer : the 
highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, 
are his by inheritance ; the richest harvest of fame 10 
he soon reaps, in another province, by his own 
hand. And what does all this avail him ? Is he 
happy, is he good, is he true? Alas, he has a 
poet's soul, and strives towards the Infinite and 
the Eternal ; and soon feels that all this is but 15 
mounting to the house-top to reach the stars ! 
Like Burns, he is only a proud man ; might, like 
him, have ' purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to 
study the character of Satan ' ; for Satan also is 
Byron's grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, 20 
and the model apparently of his conduct. As 
in Burns's case too, the celestial element will not 
mingle with the clay of earth ; both poet and man 
of the w^orld he must not be ; vulgar Ambition will 



108 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

not live kindly with poetic Adoration ; he cannot 
serve God and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is 
not happy; nay, he is the most wretched of all 
men. His life is falsely arranged : the fire that is 

5 in him is not a strong, still, central fire, warming 
into beauty the products of a world ; but it is the 
mad fire of a volcano; and now — we look sadly 
into the ashes of a crater, which ere long will fill 
itself with snow ! 

10 Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries 

\ to their generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, 
a purer Trutli ; they had a message to deliver, 
which left them no rest till it was accomplished ; 
in dim throes of pain, this divine behest lay 

15 smouldering within them ; for tliey knew not 
what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious an- 
ticipation, and they had to die without articulately 
uttering it. They are in the camp of the Uncon- 
verted ; yet not as high messengers of rigorous 

20 though benignant truth, but as soft flattering sing- 
ers, and in pleasant fellowship will they live there : 
they are first adulated, then persecuted ; they ac- 
complish little for others ; they find no peace for 
themselves, but only death and the peace of the 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 109 

grave. We confess, it is not without a certain 
mournful awe that we view the fate of these noble 
souls, so richly gifted, yet ruined to so little pur- 
pose with all their gifts. It seems to us there is 
a stern moral taught in this piece of history, — 6 
twice told us in our own time ! Surely to men of 
like genius, if there be any such, it carries with it 
a lesson of deep impressive significance. Surely 
it would become such a man, furnished for the 
highest of all enterprises, that of being the Poet 10 
of his Age, to consider well what it is that he 
attempts, and in what spirit he attempts it. For 
the words of Milton are true in all times, and were . 
never truer than in this : ' He who would write 
heroic poems must make his whole life a heroic 15 
poem.' If he cannot first so make his life, then 
let him hasten from this arena ; for neither its lofty 
glories, nor its fearful perils, are fit for him. Let 
him dwindle into a modish balladmonger ; let him 
worship and be-sing the idols of the time, and the 20 
time will not fail to reward him. If, indeed, he 
can endure to live in that capacity ! Byron and 
Burns could not live as idol-priests, but the fire of 
their own hearts consumed them ; and better it 



110 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

was for them that they could not. For it is not 
in the favor of the great or of the small, but in a 
life of truth, and in the inexpugnable citadel of 
his own soul, that a Byron's or a Burns's strength 

5 must lie. Let the great stand aloof from him, 
or know how to reverence him. Beautiful is the 
union of wealth with favor and furtherance for 
literature ; like the costliest flower-jar enclosing 
the loveliest amaranth. Yet let not the relation be 

10 mistaken. A true poet is not one whom they can 
hire by money or flattery to be a minister of their 
pleasures, their writer of occasional verses, their 
purveyor of table-wit ; he cannot be their menial, 
he cannot even be their partisan. At the peril of 

15 both parties, let no such union be attempted ! Will 
a Courser of the Sun work softly in the harness of 
a Dray-horse ? His hoofs are of fire, and his path 
is through the heavens, bringing light to all lands ; 
will he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale for 

20 earthly appetites from door to door? 

^ But we must stop short in these considerations, 

» which would lead us to boundless lengths. We 

had something to say on the public moral character 

of Burns ; but this also we must forbear. We are 



ESSAY ON BURNS, 111 

far from regarding him as guilty before the world, 
as guiltier than the average ; nay, from doubting 
that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. 
Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where 
the Plebiscita of common civic reputations are 5 
pronounced, he has seemed to us even there less 
worthy of blame than of pity and wonder. But 
the world is habitually unjust in its judgments of 
such men; unjust on many grounds, of which this 
one may be stated as the substance : It decides, 10 
like a court of law, by dead statutes ; and not 
positively but negatively, less on what is done 
right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Not 
the few inches of deflection from the mathematical 
orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio 15 
of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the 
real aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its 
diameter the breadth of the solar system ; or it may 
be a city hippodrome ; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, 
its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the 20 
inches of deflection only are measured : and it is 
assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and 
that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when 
compared with them ! Here lies the root of many 



112 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, 
Ronsseaus, which one never listens to with ap- 
proval. Granted, the ship comes into harbor with 
shrouds and tackle damaged ; the pilot is blame- 

5 worthy ; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful : 

but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether 

his voyage has been round the Globe, or only to 

Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs. 

<n Va With our readers in general, )vith men of right 

10 feeling anywhere, we are not required to plead for 
Burns. In pitying admiration he lies enshrined in 
all our hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than that 
one of marble ; neither will his Works, even as 
they are, pass away from the memory of men. 

15 While the Shakspeares and Miltons roll on like 
mighty rivers through the country of Thought, 
bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl- 
fishers on their waves ; this little Valclusa Foun- 
tain will also arrest our eye : for this also is of 

20 Nature's own and most cunning workmanship, 
bursts from the depths of the earth, with a full 
gushing current, into the light of day ; and often 
will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear 
waters, and muse among its rocks and pines ! 



l>fOTES. 



Carlyle's peculiar use of capitals is not adequately de- 
scribed as a " fashion caught from the German," for the Ger- 
man fashion is to capitalize every substantive. It may have 
been encouraged by his German studies ; but it is really a 
peculiar adaptation of our earlier English practice of capital- 
izing the important words in a sentence, as we still do in the 
case of titles and headings. It often indicates some unusual 
emphasis of idea rather than of utterance, or it suggests a 
signification transcending the ordinary and literal one ; — 
generalization, specialization, personification, allusion, or the 
absolute. 

The most notable departure from our present practice in 
punctuation is also an older usage now set aside. The colon 
is at present limited for the most part to the formal introduc- 
tion of a block of material differing in kind from that in which 
it is embedded, — such as a citation or an enumeration of par- 
ticulars. Carlyle, however, constantly uses it, as it is used in 
our English Bible, to indicate a larger sentence-break between 
the semicolon and the period. He is thus able to wield without 
confusion much larger sentence-units than are easily managed 
under our scheme — of commas only for the most part, — and 
to dictate more surely the emphatic pauses which are so im- 
portant a feature in the utterance of his thoughts. 

113 



114 NOTES. 

It should further be noted that, in accordance with what 
was then the usage, the essay is much more heavily punctuated 
throughout than would now be considered suitable ; — every 
slightest logical pause is tagged with its comma. For Car- 
lyle's use of quotation-marks see below, note to page 12, 11. 
8-10. 

Page 1, Line 3. Butler. A writer of the time of Charles II., 
very popular with king and court for a clever satire on the 
Puritans in his Tludibras^ yet for all that suffered to die in 
neglect and want. 

2, 3. a brave mausoleum — said, partly at least in irony, 
of the monstrosity erected in 1815 over his grave in Dumfries. 

3, 5-6. Sir Thomas Lucy and John a Combe. Two promi- 
nent men of the neighborhood of Stratford, under whose ill- 
will Shakspere is said to have suffered, — in the one case, in 
consequence of the famous deer-stealing escapade and a 
bitter lampoon in which Shakspere revenged himself for 
Lucy's prosecution of the matter ; and in the other because of 
a mock epitaph too sharply satirizing the capitalist's greed. 
See Sidney L. Lee's Life of Shakespeare, pp. 27, 269. 

3, 13. bowels — compassion — a frequent meaning in our 
earlier writers. 

3, 16-20. With the various gi'oups here named, Burns in 
his chequered career became too closely involved to permit of 
impartiality in their judgment of him. The Excise Commis- 
sioners were Bm-ns' official superiors whose criticism he en- 
countered in the incident described further on (p. 86, 11. 6-12, 
and note). The Caledonian Hunt was a club of Scottish nobility 
and gentry to which Burns dedicated the second edition of his 
poems, and whose warm support made that edition possible. 
The Dumfries Aristocracy, at first glad to be his boon com- 



NOTES. 115 

panions, gradually dropped him as he sank lower and lower 
toward the end. See p. 87. Writers is the Scotch term for 
*' lawyers." One of these was Kobert Aiken, the warm 
friend to whom he dedicated The C otter'' s Saturday Night. 
Others of them were ''the merciless pack of the law un- 
coupled at his heels" which so nearly drove him into exile. 
See note to p. 71. The Old Lights were the conservative and 
severe party in the Scottish Church, which undertook to dis- 
cipline the wayward poet, and in return was mercilessly pil- 
loried by him in The Holy Fair, The Twa Herds^ and other 
satires. The New Lights were the opposing liberal party 
which coquetted with Burns, well pleased, in the furious 
quarrel then raging, to win to their side so formidable a cham- 
pion. See p. 69. The Old Lights have recently been sketched 
for us in kindlier mood by Barrie in his Auld Licht Idylls and 
A Window in Thrums. 

6, 12. Birkbeck. A traveller whose Notes on a Journey 
in America were still recent when this essay was written. 
Carlyle's "backwoods" is of course a whimsical gibe like our 
own " wild and woolly West." 

8, 7. The section which closes at this point seems to 
,have suffered somewhat more than the rest of the essay at the 
hands of Jeffrey. See Introduction, p. xxiii. Traces of his work 
are probably to be seen in the conventional qualifications, " we 
think," "as we believe," and the like, scattered about here 
and there, and particularly in the pointless deprecation which 
ruins the last paragraph. Such things are wholly unlike Car- 
lyle. There has been equally disastrous "tinkering" in the 
third paragraph below. Apart from these ' ' editorial blotches, ' ' 
as Carlyle calls them, the section which follows next, summing 
up the total impression which the poet's life has made upon 



116 NOTES. 

him, is in Carlyle's best style, illuminated with sustained 
imagery and thrilling with lyric emotion. 

10, 12-13. Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson were 
popular poets of Scottish life a generation or two before Burns, 
but certainly not men of genius. Fergusson seems especially to 
have appealed to Burns as akin to him " in both the good and 
the bad of his temperament." See Blackie's Burns, chap. III. 

12, 8-10. Carlyle's quotation marks cover a much wider 
range of effects than is common among authors and printers. 
Thus, though ' amid the melancholy main ' is a real citation 
from Thomson's Castle of Indolence, I. 30, * a spectacle of pity 
and fear ' seems to be no quotation at all, — the marks serving 
only to render unmistakable the allusion to Aristotle' famous 
definition of tragedy, and its function of purifying the emotions 
through pity and fear. More frequently, perhaps, we have an 
imitation, a free transcript or adaptation, involving change of 
words and construction, as in the passage on p. 14, 11. 9-10, 
adapted from Burns, and on p. 16, 11. 12-14, which is a free 
sketch of one of Richter's favorite similes. Quite as often the 
apparent quotation is merely a reminiscent phrase, an echo 
from his general reading or from current news or talk, or a 
recurrent pet phrase of his own. Such doubtless are ' descrip- 
tive touches,' p. 33, 1. 1, ^persons of quality,' p. 51, 1. 19, and 
* patrons of genius,' p. 83, 1. 18, for whose precise origin there 
is no need to inquire. It is easy to see how this freedom served 
Carlyle's constant effort to throw certain points of his thought 
into highest relief, and to pack his expression with the utmost 
of emphasis and suggeJition. 

Throughout this and his other early essays the single inverted 
commas alone are used, and such seems to have been the prac- 
tice of the time. In his later writings the double commas also 



NOTES. 117 

appear, but are limited to the actual quotation of speech^ real 
or imagined, and thus form a distinct part of his dramatic 
machinery. 

12, 24. Eternal Melodies. A favorite phrase of Carlyle's, 
caught from the German, and one of his many symbolic vari- 
ants for Truth or Wisdom. 

14, 1-4. See the poems To a Mountain Daisy and To a 
Mouse, thole, to endure ; cranreuch, hoar-frost. 

14, 20. The Arcadia of pastoral poetry was professedly a 
realm of "life among the lowly," for its inhabitants were of 
no higher rank than shepherds and shepherdesses ; but it was 
wholly unreal in that the pressure of labor, care, and want 
was never felt. 

16, 21. At this point we reach the first main topic of the 
essay — the character and quality of the poet as i3isc?rrRQd in 
his writings. The admirable point in this discussion is th« 
masterful analysis which traces all the varied qualities of the 
poetry to three fundamental qualities in the man : Sincerity, 
Vision, Sympathy. 

19, 10. Horace^ s rule — 

.si vis meflere, dolendum est 
Primum ipsi tibi. Ars. Poetica, 102. 
*' If you would have me weep, you must yourself grieve first." 

20, 22 ff . The critical estimate of Byron has suffered great 
fluctuation. In 1881 Matthew Arnold, quoting Swinburne with 
approval, spoke of " the splendid and imperishable excellence 
which covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects : the 
excellence of sincerity and strength." Essays, Second Series. 
The present estimate is probably nearer Carlyle's. 

24, 10. Mrs. Dunlop. One of the poet's most cherished 



118 . NOTES. 

friends. Some forty of Burns' letters to her are published in 
Currie's edition of the Works. 

24, 20 ff. The writing of romance was now in full swing, 
and Carlyle has here his gird at one of its most common man- 
nerisms, the attempt to secure for its representations, through 
the device of remoteness or fancifulness of scene, the glamor 
of that "light that never was on sea or land." The types of its 
heroes, so maliciously grouped below, may be readily identified 
by readers of Scott, Byron, Southey, and Cooper. 

27, 19. The Minerva Press had for many years been flood- 
ing England with sentimental novels. 

29, 3-5. Tarbolton and Mossgiel were the homes of the 
Burns family during Robert's youth and early manhood. 
Crockford's, when Carlyle wrote, was the latest aristocratic 
gambling-club in London. The Tuileries was, of course, the 
famous royal palace in Paris. 

29, 9. A doctrine nearly akin to this had been recently 
propounded and maintained with great spirit by Macaulay in 
his Essay on Milton. 

30, 8-9. The Council of Trent and the Roman Jubilee are 
named as concrete examples of great religious gatherings, of 
world-wide interest and importance. Such the Holy Fair was 
not, being but the annual country-side meeting for conference 
and the celebration of the Lord's Supper. The poet attends it 
at the invitation of, and in company with, the merry lass Fun^ 
and enjoys himself greatly at the expense of the old hags, 
Superstition and Hypocrisy. 

32, 7. Retzsch, Friedrich August Moritz, a German 
painter and etcher coming into fame about the time of this 
writing. His best known works are his illustrations of Goethe, 
Schiller, and Shakspere. 



NOTES. 119 

32, 8-11. With what is said here of vision compare the 
somewhat similar statement with reference to sincerity, p. 22, 
11. 18-20. Note how finely Carlyle has distinguished between 
the intellectual power of clear vision, which is indeed "the 
root and foundation of every sort of talent,^'' and the moral 
principle of sincerity, "the root of most other virtues.^'' 
The two are of different realms, and each is supreme in its 
own. For a very full and suggestive discussion and applica- 
tion of these ideas see Lewes' Principles of Success in Litera- 
ture, chapters II-IV. 

32, 15 ff. Many of Burns' dialectal forms, such as snawy 
(snowy), gies (gives), may be readily identified with their par- 
allel forms in standard English, or may be found in any good 
dictionary. The following from this selection and the next 
may offer more difficulty : — bocked, vomited ; thowes, thaws ; 
rowes, rolls; snaw-broo (snow-broth), slush; speat (spate), 
freshet, flood ; brigs, bridges ; to the gate, to destruction ; 
gumlie jaups, muddy jets. Carlyle has inadvertently applied 
the prophecy to the wrong bridge ; — it was the '• ' New Brig ' ' 
that was to fall. See the poems : A Winter Night and The 
Brigs of Ayr. 

34, 1. Poussin, Nicholas, a celebrated French painter of 
the 17th century, whose Deluge (with which Burns' picture 
here is compared) now hangs in the Louvre at Paris. 

34, 6 ff. The references here are, on the one hand, to 
Burns' The Auld Farmer^ s New Year Morning Salutation to his 
Auld Mare, Maggie ; and on the other to the Iliad, Book XVIII. 
for the ploughing scene on the shield of Achilles, and to the 
Iliad, Book XXIV. Note that the scenes are merely similar in 
kind, and th^it the comparison of the art is solely with reference 
to " clearness and minute fidelity " of the presentation in each 



120 NOTES. 

case. It is no doubt true, however, that throughout this essay 
Carlyle's constant comparison of Burns with the world's great 
masters, suggests in him a higher excellence than a cooler 
judgment will approve. It is to be noted that Carlyle, drawing 
here upon his memory, has forgotten that Homer's fire-god 
forges the armor himself in his own workshop. It is Virgil 
who makes the Cyclops the actual artificers. And it is doubt- 
less this remembered scene of Virgil's " Smithy of the Cyclops " 
{^neid, VIII. 407-463) , \\'hich has called up the next reference 
to the poem Scotch Drink, stanzas 10, 11, where Burn-the-wind 
— in the poem it is clipped to Burnewin — is the brawny 
blacksmith at his forge. 

36, 11-19. The passage is from a remarkable letter of 
Dugald Stewart to Dr. Currie. See the latter's Works of 
Robert Burns, where nearly all of the correspondence cited in 
the essay may be found. 

36, 21 ff. This would seem to be the mythical Keats of 
Byron and tradition. The real Keats should hardly be dis- 
missed with this contemptuous estimate. See Matthew Arnold's 
Essays, Second Series: John Keats. 

37, 14. Novum Organum. The great philosophical work of 
Bacon which ushered in the inductive method of modern science. 

38, 17. the passage above quoted is carelessly said for 
*'the letter quoted above." The remark here referred to 
comes at the end of Professor Stewart's letter, and runs as 
follows: ^'A present which Mr. Alison sent him afterwards 
of his Essays on Taste drew fi»om Burns a letter of acknowl- 
edgment, which I remember to have read with some degree of 
siu-prise at the distinct conception he appeared from it to have 
formed of the doctrine of association" [sc. of ideas]. Burns' 
letter also may be seen in Currie's edition. 



NOTES. 121 

38, 23. The extract is from Burns' letter to Mrs. Dunlop of 
New Year's Day, 1789. 

41, 16-26. From A Winter Nighty the opening stanzas of 
which were quoted above on page 32, 11. 15 ff. ourie is shiver- 
ing ; brattle, outburst ; lairing, floundering ; sprattle, struggle ; 
scar (scaur), cliff; ilk, each. 

42, 9 ff. From the famous Address to the JDeil. aiblins, 
perhaps. Dr. Slop and Uncle Toby are characters from 
Sterne's Tristram Shandy, cited here as exemplifying, on the 
one hand, " hating with right orthodoxy," and, on the other, 
such sympathetic tenderness as that of Burns. 

42, 21. Indignation makes verses — facit indignatio versum. 
Juvenal, Satire, 1, 79. The idea which Carlyle expounds in 
the next few sentences has found striking presentation in 
Tennyson's Poet — 

" Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
The love of love." 

43, 24 ff. Dweller in yon Dungeon dark — from the Ode 
Sacred to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald. The Furies of 
-^schylus, in his Eumenides. darkness visible is Milton's 
phrase in Paradise Lost, I. 63. 

45, 5. Macpherson was " a noted Highland freebooter, of 
uncommon strength, and an excellent performer on the violin," 
who played and sang a Farewell at the foot of "the gallows- 
tree," and then broke his violin on his knee when no one 
would come forward to accept it as a parting gift from him. 
Burns' lines were set to Macpherson' s air, and the refrain is 
an adaptation of the original one. Cacus was a half-human 
monster of Latin legend, robber, cattle-thief, and scourge of 
his region until Hercules put an end to his career. See 
JSneid, VIII. 190-270. 



122 NOTES. 

The concreteness and vividness of Carlyle's expression is 
one of its most notable features. Instead of telling us here in 
general terms what sort of man Macpherson was, — a Scotch 
robber and cattle-thief, — he calls up a definite image and 
personality : " this grim Celt, this shaggy Northland Cacus," 
*'one of the Nimrods and Napoleons of the earth ;" and he 
frames his portrait visually ''in his own remote, misty 
glens." 

45, 21. Thebes and Pelops' line stand here, as they do in 
Milton's II PenserosOy 1. 99, for the stern themes of Greek 
tragedy, and in particular of the CEdipus and the Agamemnon; 
— another example of Carlyle's constant preference for the 
concrete to the abstract or the generalized expression. See 
also p. 29, 11. 3-5, p. 30, 1. 9, and below ; p. 48, 11. 6-7. 

48, 6-7. Musaeus and Tieck were popular German wrriters 
who dealt with folk-lore ; the latter with much more sincerity, 
insight, and imaginative power than the former, who is inclined 
to treat it, as Carlyle himself says, " with levity and kind, 
skeptical derision." — See his German Romance. 

49, 17 ff. The Scotch terms in this passage are designations 
of the various characters in the Jolly Beggars. Their signifi- 
cance will appear on reading the poem. The Beggars' Bush 
and the Beggars' Opera, named below, were earlier pieces 
(17th- and 18th-century), dealing in comic fashion with the life 
of thieves and vagabonds. 

50, 14. David Teniers, father and son, were Flemish 
painters celebrated for their skill in rendering just such pictu- 
resque low life and vagabondage as Burns has sketched in his 
Jolly Beggars. 

51, 21. in the flowing and watery vein of Osorius — 
Gieronymo Osorio (1506-80), Bishop of Sylves, whose much- 



NOTES. 123 

praised '^elegance of style" called forth this scornful com- 
ment from Bacon in his Advancement of Learning, Bk. I., 
ch. iii. 

52, 13 ff. The reader will find in this passage an admirable 
presentation of the essential features of the Lyric. 

54, 6. In saying '•'■ our Fletcher,'* Carlyle speaks as a 
Scotchman, and so distinguishes Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun 
from the three Fletcher cousins of English literature : Giles, 
Phineas, and John. So also below, p. 66, 11. 8 ff. It was 
not till a much later period, and after long residence in Lon- 
don, that Carlyle distinctly identified himself with English 
writers. 

55, 14-15. Thomas Gray, of course, and the less famous 
Richard Glover (1712-1786), author of Leonidas, The Athenaid, 
etc. , are here taken as types of writers without national color 
and feeling. 

59, 24. The allusion is to the Happy Valley of Dr. John- 
son's Rasselas (q. v.), a home of all delight, and a secure 
retreat from trouble and care. In the next sentence the 
reference is doubtless to Burns' interest in Fergusson, already 
mentioned (note to p. 10, 1. 12), and his erection of a stone over 
the poet's neglected grave. 

60, 6. From the poem To the Guidwife of Wauchope 
House. 

60, 16. This paragraph is transitional, leading up to the 
second main topic — the character and qualities of Burns as 
seen in his life. Carlyle's management of his transitions is 
admirable, and deserves the study of all who would become 
writers. The reader should notice how accurately the change 
in thought is accentuated by the change in feeling. The 
deeper note of pathos now sounded is in sharp contrast with 



124 NOTES. 

the brighter tones of joy in the richness and perfection of the 
poet's art. 

62, 4-7. The thought here expressed is enforced again on 
p. 108, 11. 12-16. It should not be taken as at all contra- 
vening what is said by implication on p. 22, 1 10, that Burns 
did read his own consciousness without mistakes. " Conscious- 
ness " there means not conviction of duty, or sense of one's 
"mission," but rather those experiences both outward and 
inward which form the raw material of poetry. 

65, 18. the crossing of a brook — Caesar's crossing of the 
Rubicon. 

66, 13-14. The quoted phrases are from The Cotter'' s 
Saturday Nighty stanzas 12 and 14. 

67, 12-13. Wordsworth's lines referring distinctly to Burns, 
inexactly quoted from his Besolution and Independence. 

69, 12. adamant — lodestone or magnet, a very frequent 
meaning of the word in our earlier writers. The allusion is to 
the tale of shipwreck through the attraction of " a mountain 
of adamant" in the Arabian Nights, History of the Third 
Calender. 

71, 4 ff. In dire extremity Burns planned to seek refuge in 
Jamaica as an overseer on a plantation. The following from 
Burns himself will make clear the various matters involved in 
the passage : "As soon as I was master of nine guineas, the 
price of wafting me to the torrid zone, I took a steerage pas- 
sage in the first ship that was to sail from the Clyde, for 

' Hungry ruin had me in the wind.' 

I had been for some days skulking from covert to covert 
under all the terrors of a jail, as some ill-advised people had 
uncoupled the merciless pack of the law at my heels. I had 



NOTES. 126 

taken the last farewell of my few friends ; my chest was on 
the road to Greenock. I had composed the last song I was 
ever to measure in Caledonia, The Gloomy Night is Gathering 
Fast, — when a letter from Dr. Blacklock overthrew all my 
schemes by opening new prospects to my poetic ambition." 
Letter to Dr. Moore, Aug. 2, 1787. See also I'he Author^s 
Farewell to his Native Country, from which the four lines 
are quoted. 

72, 10. " Oh that I were a mockery king of snow ! " Shak- 
spere's Richard II., Act IV., sc. i. 260. 

74, 16. From a letter of Walter Scott to Lockhart, 1827, 
cited in Lockhart ' s Life of Burns. ' ' Virgilium vidi tantum,^ ' — 
Virgil I merely saw, — is from Ovid's Tristia, IV. x. 51. 

76, 15. Mr. Nasmyth's picture is the portrait which was 
engraved for the first Edinburgh edition of the poemiS, and 
has since been repeated so often that it is now our most famil- 
iar likeness of Burns. It represents him with a landscape 
background in which appears the ruined Alloway Kirk of 
Tarn o^Shanter. 

76, 23. douce gudeman, — shrewd householder. 

78, 10. in malam partem — to his disparagement. 

80, 17. Blacklock. Dr. Thomas Blacklock, the blind poet 
and scholar, whose kind letter of commendation had saved 
Burns from exile, See above, note to p. 71, 1. 4. 

82, 3. The allusion is to the pool of Bethesda and its 
miraculous cures after its waters had been stirred by an angel. 
John V : 2-9. 

84, 8. Maecenases. Maecenas was a Roman of wealth and 
luxurious tastes, and a patron of poets and artists, — particu- 
larly of Horace. The term is Carlyle's concrete expression 
for "patrons of genius." 



126 NOTES. 

86, 3. Burns was an officer under a Tory government 
which strongly opposed the principles and practice of the 
French Revolution, and which was likely at any moment 
to be engaged in war with the Revolutionary Government. 
Yet he was reckless enough to proclaim repeatedly by word 
and deed his sympathy with the hated "democracy," and, 
it is said, went so far as to make a present to the French Con- 
vention of some guns he had purchased at the sale of a smug- 
gler's equipment. Such presumption could hardly be overlooked, 
and the Excise Commissioners directed an examination into 
Burns' political conduct and utterances. The matter seems to 
have been pushed no further than a private warning to the 
indiscreet officer ; but the humiliation was keenly felt, and to 
Burns' apprehensive temperament it seemed to mean no less 
than the ruin of all his worldly affairs. 

88, 9. Lady Grizzel Baillie's ballad will be found in most 
collections of Scottish song under the title : " Werena my heart 
licht, I wad dee.''' 

89, 4. The phrase carries us back to the tragic fate of 
Swift — a spirit more puissant, a heart more proud, and more 
savagely torn by its own " bitter indignation." It is translated 
from the epitaph composed by Swift himself, and engraved 
upon his tomb. 

89, 20 ff. See Lockhart's Life of Burns^ chapter VII. 

90, 5. he spurned all other reward. During the last nine 
years of Bm^ns' life, almost the whole of his poetical production, 
amounting to about a hundred and seventy separate pieces, 
was freely contributed by him to two collections of Scottish 
Song. To the editor of one of these he writes : "As to any 
remuneration, you may think my songs eitber above or below 
praise ; for they shall be absolutely the one or the other. In 



NOTES. 127 

the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your under- 
taking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, etc., would be 
downright prostitution of soul." — Letter to Mr. Thomson^ Wth 
Sept. 1792. See Currie's Burns. 

93, 21. twice cursed — a witty turn upon Portia's famous 
characterization of the quality of mercy as "twice blest," 
Merchant of Venice^ Act IV., sc. i. 196-7. The " close obser- 
ver of manners " has not been identified. 

96, 2-5. The phrases are adapted from Burns' dedication 
of the Edinburgh edition of 1787, q. v. 

96, 6-7. The preserving of game is Carlyle's favorite and 
scornful summing up of the " whole duty " of the aristocracy. 
(See also p. 3, 1. 7.) Borough interests are what we should 
perhaps call the interests of local politics. 

96, 20. It was Nebuchadnezzar who in his pride "spake 
and said : Is not this great Babylon that I have built ... by 
the might of my power and for the honor of my majesty ?" 
Daniel iv. 30. Note how the withering scorn of this whole 
passage is ironically veiled under the suggested softness of 
pity and forgiveness. 

97, 13. the fardels of a weary life is a reminiscence from 
Hamlet's famous soliloquy, — Hamlet, Act III., sc. i., 76-77. 

100, 9. Restaurateur — "Mere purveyor of refreshment or 
amusement." The term is one which Carlyle had recently 
applied to Scott, and he may have him in mind here. " Scott 
is the great intellectual restaurateur of Europe. What are his 
novels — any one of them ? A bout of champagne, claret, 
port, or even ale drinking. Are we wiser, better, holier, 
stronger? No. — We have been amused." — Fronde's Car- 
lyle, ch. XX. 

101, 24-102, 3. The phrases are from Milton's touching 



128 JN'07'A'.S'. 

reference to his own condition in Paradise Lost, Book VII., 
11. 25-31. 

102, 4 . The Araucana was an account of the Spanish con- 
quest of Araucania (in Chili), written by ** the stout fighter and 
voyager," Alonso de Ercilla. 

105, 15. Jean Paul Richter, the German humorist and phil- 
osopher. Carlyle had recently written an article upon him for 
the Edinburgh Review. 

107, 18-19. The story is told by Burns himself, — Letter 
to William Nichol, 18th June, 1787. 

109, 14-15. Milton's exact words in this famous passage 
are : " He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write 
well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true 
poem." — Apology for Smectymnuus. 

111, 5. In ancient Rome, a plehiscitum was the determina- 
tion of a matter in question by vote of the general populace. 

112, 8. Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs are named as the 
objectives of short pleasure trips from London down the 
Thames. 

112, 18. Valclusa — the Latin form of the French Vau- 
cluse, a romantic, sheltered valley near Avignon, watered by a 
stream which gushes forth from a rocky cavern. Here was for 
many years the home of the Italian lyric poet Petrarch ; and 
by the use of this name Carlyle means delicately to couple the 
fame of the younger poet with that of the author- of the 
Sonnets to Laura. 



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